“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” or so goes the oft-quoted first line of LP Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. But when it comes to video art, the past is more like a galaxy far, far away. This is made abundantly clear in Cinemania, a survey show spanning three decades of video and photography by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana.
Caz Haswell presented cunning facsimiles of ordinary things; she rendered the familiar strange and invoked the eerie and the uncanny.
In An unorthodox flow of images at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, the arrangement of the exhibition mirrored the title.
The works confront you in the foyer of the gallery; large, gestural paintings of a central figure, a fleshy man whose red mouth full of teeth is mirrored by the red toothy snarl of the black dog.
In Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston we begin at the end: a funeral. Well-dressed men and women sob, tears running down their cheeks.
Phillip England is a former population geneticist with the CSIRO. He took up photography five years ago and most of his images are produced with a large bellows camera.
The Score took music notation as a site of translation between sound, colour, speech, movement, dance and line – and as a way to conceptualise cross-disciplinary practice.
Detail is important in a visual imagination, but it also punctuates an individual’s memory. This exhibition draws together artworks made since 2002 by Noel McKenna that are also highly personal and idiosyncratic maps.
Deb Mansfield’s artworks are little puzzles to be solved. In this she is not alone. Most art, or at least good art, makes viewers into cryptographers.
Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, the Goose Girl, the Juniper Tree. Versions of these stories exist across cultures, their elements shifting subtly through a thousand retellings.
Showcasing the work of its founding members, the exhibition is packed with works from the 1980s up to the present day. The Boomalli Ten feels like a celebration not just of those 10 artists but more broadly of the Indigenous Australian art now flourishing in the post-colonial present.
Standing in front of Leora Sibony’s Industrial Relations at Lismore Regional Gallery it is hard not to be reminded of some of the Dada-infused German art of the 1920s.
