Future food on the menu in Plenty
As urbanised humans are increasingly distanced from the means of food production, the choice of what and how we eat becomes a political act.
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As urbanised humans are increasingly distanced from the means of food production, the choice of what and how we eat becomes a political act.
Adorn explores how items we put on our bodies are invested with meaning – not only by their creators, but by the people who wear them. The result is a series of stories as varied as the individuals who wear the objects.
Curiouser and Curiouser takes that classic of absurdity and perceptual play, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as its starting point.
In These Hands expands into a broad survey, marking out the diverse practices of some 28 living Ernabella painters, ceramicists, punu (timber) workers and weavers working with tjanpi desert grass.
“In this new body of work my paintings focus on houses that were influenced by the trend of modernism that crept into the suburbs, mainly in the 1960s,” says Sweaney.
The work of James Geurts traverses a range of territories: fault lines in Bendigo, archaeological sites in Melbourne, Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory, tectonic plates colliding in Italy and two different points on the meridian.
Milledge’s visual language slips between abstract painting and witchy mysticism; the connections between work and title often oblique. Is gazing at a painting and trying to divine its meaning really so different from reading entrails or casting bones?
At first glance, Nick Cave’s Until is a charm offensive: a crowd-pleasing, selfie-backdrop, colour-and-movement spectacle complete with accompanying gift shop, but there are tougher meanings here too.
Bright, arresting portraits were on the hit list for National Portrait Gallery curator Christopher Chapman when he started putting together a new show to help celebrate the gallery’s 20th anniversary.
Timbre represents Mestitz’s first collection of two-dimensional paintings on board, a departure from the architectural blends of sculpture and painting she has been working with since the late 1990s.
“Their works speak to their particular interests,” says Murphy, “which are indebted to the ancient traditions of a long existing culture, but that also look outside this to Western art.”
A Minang/Noongar man from Western Australia, Christopher Pease creates multi-layered paintings combining traditional Indigenous stories with 19th-century colonial narratives, powerfully subverting images like those produced by Lieutenant Robert Dale and his contemporaries.
