OSLO DAVIS: In mid-2020, when I was faced with the prospect of little or no paid work coming in, I had to do something. My Postcard Project, a mercifully Covid-free, direct-mail, original art project, in many ways saved me. I drew more than 300 postcards—some pretty, some wacky— and sent them out to friends and strangers who ordered them online, potluck style: you got what you were given. It helped pay the rent and kept my hands moving. But more than that, it activated my funny brain muscle.
Absurdity and nonsense both have that unique power to disarm and tickle a viewer, if only for a microsecond. During recent dour times this tickle became a panacea—well, it was for me at least, but also hopefully for all the good folk who took a punt not knowing what the hell they would get in their letterbox. Here’s a few of them.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Now showing at Home of the Arts (HOTA), the sophomore Gold Coast Triennial, Here and Now, brings together 42 contemporary artists to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
