Offering viewers a site to contemplate belief and transformation. Driven by a desire to give physical form to the intangibility of fraught emotional states such as grief, anger, fear, love and hopefulness, the artist uses repetition, replication and degradation of imagery, sounds and motifs to explore how meaning moves through, and translates between forms.
In Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, now showing at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Australian-Filipina artist Bhenji Ra explores pangalay—a dance form indigenous to the Tausug and Bajau peoples from the Sulu Archipelago and Sabah in the Philippines.
Shaped by the movement between histories and cultures, the work of Thai-born, Aotearoa-raised artist Sorawit Songsataya draws on mystery and plurality as a means of knowing the world. The artist is now showing at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Monash University Museum of Art.
Consuelo Cavaniglia’s sunny studio in an industrial area of Sydney’s inner west reflects the artist’s fascination with light. Her recent glass works, now showing at Chau Chak Wing Museum, play with apertures, shadows, reflections and transparencies.
From Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin to Lindy Lee and Paul Knight, an exhibition at Ipswich Art Gallery uses the expanded field of abstraction to encourage deliberate and slow looking.
Carol Jerrems’ intimate and revealing portraits of women, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery, are a touchstone for a generation of writers and photographers. For Josephine Mead, they also galvanise the power—and limits—of feminist legacy five decades on.
The paintings of Ethel Carrick—whose legacy is being celebrated via a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia—offer distinctive and poignant lessons in seeing the world.
