Asking herself about the four edges that form the border of Australian landscape painter WC Piguenit’s 1899 work Flood in the Darling, 1890, Gabriella Hirst wondered about leakage. After all, the painting is full of water—and, looking at it, we might wonder what is beyond the frame. Rivers can never be contained or shown in their entirety, especially in a painting.
For the aptly titled Darling, Darling at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), created as part of the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, Hirst is presenting two back-to-back projections, playing simultaneously. While the distinct sounds from each film will leak into its companion film’s space, visitors will not be able to see both pieces at once.
One film is a series of landscape-based images shot around the Darling River (“Or is it the Barka-Darling or just the Barka?” asks Hirst, using its Indigenous name). The other footage, more documentary in style, examines conservation work done on the surface of the Piguenit painting at its home at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Hirst’s research for Darling, Darling has been underway since mid-2015 and the generously funded ACMI commission ($100,000) was a chance to focus her vision and bring on collaborators who have expertise in various aspects of film production. There are many ideas intertwined into this complex, provocative work: what is containment; what does the art of conserving paintings convey to us; and what did it mean for Piguenit to go out into the unceded landscape, in the early days of colonisation, to ‘capture’ it?
“Like so many art projects [in the wake of Covid-19] it has been extended so far beyond its original conception,” Hirst says. “My ideas have developed so far from where they started.”
Darling, Darling
Gabriella Hirst
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
11 February—29 April
This article was originally published in the March/April 2021 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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.
In her latest exhibition at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Ellen Dahl presents works from an ongoing photographic series that has captured many sites—from the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard to Tasmania—creating a dialogue between works that center place.
In a new exhibition at Australian Galleries, Kyoko Imazu’s intricate papercuts show worlds in miniature—Some of works are only 15 centimetres tall, yet their detail is meticulous.
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.
