Joann Mott, End of the World as We Know it, view two, 2016. Image courtesy the artist and MARS Art Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph by Matthew Stanton.
Anne Noble, Dead Bee Portrait #01, 2016, pigment on Canson Baryta paper. Courtesy the artist.
Jason deCaires Taylor, Inertia, 2011. Image courtesy the artist and RMIT Gallery, Melbourne.
Murray Fredericks, Mirror 16, 2017, digital pigment print, 120 x 155 cm. Image courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.
Penelope Davis, Untitled, 2016, silicone, nylon thread, plastic, dimensions variable. Photographed by Simon Strong. Image courtesy the artist and MARS Art Gallery, Melbourne.
Raymond Arnold, Elsewhere World – Consolidated I, December 2016, etching on 300 gsm Arches paper, 80 x 115 cm, First State edition. Image courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries.
Brodie Ellis, The Crystal World, (still), 2016, SD video and stereo sound, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist and C A V E S, Melbourne.
How do you give average citizens a sense of the overwhelming nature of man-made global warming? As news coverage shows Donald Trump donning a hard hat and giving a presidential thumbs-up to unrestrained coal-fired power, or pitiful images of polar bears stranded on ice sheets which induce a sense of ordinary human helplessness, might art be an empowering alternative?
In March, respected monthly peer-reviewed science journal Nature Climate Change argued that art and music “anchors” climate change to culture, that a conversation on the planet’s future can be built through the visceral experiences of the visual and the aural. In fact, the division of culture and climate appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, separated in the 19th century by the birth of meteorology and the emergence of social sciences.
In 2015, the independent Australian not-for-profit organisation CLIMARTE attempted to reconnect the now urgent environmental agenda with the visual arts. The inaugural biennial ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE festival featured 25 exhibitions across Melbourne and regional Victoria.
The second festival opens officially on 19 April, but several shows are already open. ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 offers 30 exhibitions and a score of additional public programs to inform, inspire and encourage personal action.
There are two must-see attractions previously seen by this arts writer. The first is EXIT, a 360-degree projection that vividly shows deforestation, rising seas and mass migration, and the sounds of languages being lost. The second is British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s large three-screen work Vertigo Sea, from the 2015 Venice Biennale and featured in this year’s Perth Festival: a triptych of three films of frenetically shifting sea images alternately stunning and bludgeoning; this journalist felt small after viewing the work given the ferocity of the sea and the cruel dispatch of humanity and wildlife. Both EXIT and Vertigo Sea are free at the Ian Potter Museum of Art from 19 April.
There will also be a range of talks that prompt action. On 1 May, at Melbourne University, Edward Morris, American artist and co-founder of The Canary Project, will discuss the many ways that artists can contribute to social movements which deal with global warming, drawing on his own work creating activist posters and museum exhibitions.
Can art change minds about environmental degradation? “On occasion it might be able to do that,” says CLIMARTE CEO and co-founder Guy Abrahams. “Peter Dombrovskis’s Rock Island Bend photograph published during the campaign to save the Franklin River in Tasmania was an image that was published around Australia, and it was such an incredible image spiritually and aesthetically… that one image probably saved a river and changed a government.”
But as Abrahams points out, “You can’t manufacture those moments. Particular works might provide moments of personal epiphany.”
Other key ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE exhibitions to catch include:
Anne Noble: No Vertical Song at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy until 7 May. Noble presents portraits of dead bees in contemplation of a future when they might no longer exist.
Freshwater, an exhibition of works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists at Shepparton Art Museum until 4 June, reflects on how water remains central to identity.
Wesley Stacey: The Wild Thing, is at Monash Gallery of Art until 30 April. Stacey is an environmental photographer who, in the 1970s, dropped out of city life and set up camp on the NSW south coast wilderness, living close to the land for more than 40 years.
ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017
Across Melbourne and regional Victoria
19 April – July 2017
The Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair debuts in partnership with the Melbourne Art Fair this weekend, offering a special preview of new and recent artworks from 37 Koorie artists and designers.
In her audacious new exhibition, the Filipina Australian artist Marikit Santiago skewers the myths of the western canon and give pleasure and power—as experienced by women of colour—an arresting new form.
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is a touring exhibition, and is now showing at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
Featuring work by Arrernte and Southern Luritja artist Sally M Nangala Mulda and Arrernte and Western Arrarnta artist Marlene Rubuntja, Two Girls From Amoonguna is an ACMI touring exhibition now showing at Araluen Arts Centre.
Queenslander Glen O’Malley stands as a key figure among a generation of photographers who depicted the domestic lives of Australians in the 1970s and 1980s. In an interview with Barnaby Smith, he discusses the landmark 1988 show Journeys North, and QAGOMA’s current exhibition Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography.
Since the 1980s Pat Brassington’s images have entranced the psyche of contemporary Australian art. With a new solo exhibition at Bett Gallery, Brassington gives a rare interview talking about studying art in her thirties, psychoanalysis, and discovering feminism through a wives’ book club.
