Hayden Fowler’s solo show, Future Distant History, had a distinct post-apocalyptic edge. The title was a clue (picturing the present as the past of a destroyed future is what post-apocalyptic stories do) and so was the pile of bones perched on a pretty white table.
Ashleigh Garwood is drawn to dramatic landscapes: the frigid majesty of glaciers, the caldera of volcanoes, deep ruptures in the surface of the planet; places that have an otherworldly ambience.
The prevalence of cheap, poor quality clothes, known as ‘fast fashion’, means turnover is swift and garments are discarded after only a few wears. Fast Fashion: The Dark Side of Fashion makes no bones about these facts.
After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art, currently showing at the Samstag Museum of Art as part of this year’s OzAsia Festival, has been co-curated by Siuli Tan and Louis Ho from Singapore Art Museum (SAM)
When we experience art it is often a case of look but don’t touch. The group exhibition Ex Machina turns this notion on its head and presents a refreshing critique of the role of technology in artistic experience.
“The more we understand the better we can participate in society”. These words, which greet visitors to Kader Attia’s solo show at the MCA, perfectly sum up the overarching themes of the French-Algerian artist’s project.
Sometimes you get to laugh out loud with delight in an art gallery. A Shape of Thought, the solo show by Mikala Dwyer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is so packed with wit, invention and energy that at times I caught myself emitting little happy gasps.
Taken all together, Can’t Touch This is an ode to the provocative power and diversity of contemporary textile practices.
Tastes Like Sunshine speaks to our changing relationship with food, the social attitudes which experiment with its use, the fashion which directs the way it is promoted and consumed, and its central importance as sustenance.
Along the edges of the artwork a slight glimpse reveals the balsa wood and cardboard scaffolding that holds up Blasco’s glossy photographic metropolis.
Using video and time-lapse photography, Martin Walch and David Stephenson have visually charted the recent history of southern Tasmania’s Derwent River, from its beginnings in the central highlands to its position as a waterway severely effected by industry and the urban landscape.
It was Walter Benjamin who said that artworks have an aura: a quality to do with imagined closeness to the artist.
