There are spectacular views from the windows of Blindside’s seventh-floor gallery in Melbourne’s Chicago-style Nicholas Building. Overlooking Flinders Street Station and Federation Square and then the verdant strip of Birrarung Marr, it’s not a bad spot to spend summer days if you have to be inside.
Curator of this year’s residencies Lili Belle Birchall says that the artists selected will be “exploring their practice, and then they can take their work wherever they want to”. Expect fertile testing grounds.
Play Centre is the collaborative project of Melbourne-based artists, si ma va and Jess Gall. It formed from friendship, and together they have performed both publicly and in gallery spaces to, as si ma va tells me, “do hack-job resolutions for what needs to be done”, in a jovial, performative manner.
One of the greatest needs in the world right now, and this may sound banal, is friendship, and basing a collaborative project around that idea is a well-timed glimmer of hope. Also undertaking the Studio are Jessie Burrows and Angela Louise Powell, who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015 and met up in Tokyo in late 2016. Together, they will explore this experience in the lead-up to their exhibition Shibuya Castle, named after the Tokyo apartment complex where they stayed. This summer, the pair will be experimenting with drawing, in all its myriad forms.
Blindside Summer Studio
Blindside
19 January – 21 January
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Ahead of his major retrospective at Jan Murphy Gallery, Ben Quilty spoke with fellow painter Georgia Spain about wrestling with mythology, the contradictions of joy and suffering, and a belief in art as an antidote to an increasingly volatile world.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
Whether beloved pets or superstitious omens, animals have always existed in art. The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia’s latest exhibition is paying tribute to two of the most beloved animal figures: cats and dogs.
