Steve Dow is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer, whose profiles, essays, previews and reviews range across the visual arts, theatre, film and television for The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Sunday Life, Limelight and VAULT.
Steve Dow spoke to Julie Rrap as she was preparing for the show, Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker.
How do you give average citizens a sense of the overwhelming nature of man-made global warming? Might art be an empowering alternative?
As a conceptual and pop artist, a photographer and a painter, as well as an idiosyncratic art critic for two broadsheet newspapers, Robert Rooney wielded influence.
An overview of contemporary Australian art, Sydney’s The National: New Australian Art 2017 includes crucial works by Indigenous artists, Karla Dickens and Archie Moore.
Sydney Ball was a guiding hand and mentor for the gallery and its younger artists, says Strumpf. “We loved him; he was part of our family. He was always there for counsel, and he forged some beautiful friendships with some of our artists.”
“The redback spider, she’s so fierce looking and so beautiful,” says Barton, who sees the surreal RED as a celebration of raw female power. “She’s really a weapon, so she speaks to me aesthetically.”
Exhibiting as part of Sydney Festival, Vernon Ah Kee vows not to shy away from thorny questions.
Based on an idea by French philosopher Paul Virilio, EXIT draws on a quarter of a century’s worth of scientific data to vividly animate the world’s hot spots of deforestation, rising seas and mass migration as a result of global warming.
In Stephen Dupont’s The White Sheet Series it is the curious bystanders standing adrift that captivate.
Isaac Julien’s father wanted the artist to become a banker or a lawyer: the transferred ambition was his dad’s version of a better life. Julien’s parents wanted a better life for themselves too.
A complex photo installation and three-dimensional sculpture, including a backlit crypt made of wood, will be central to the exhibition.
Almost 20 years ago as a young art student, Jonathan Jones, of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of south-east Australia, went to the Australian Museum to research the origins of his people in the Murray-Darling region.
