The ziggurat or mountain represents the graves of my ancestors – the link between the sky and the earth. Our bones melt back into the earth, symbols emerge, modes of activity, layering this curious permanent flux we are immersed in. This country has a mysterious way of giving, whispering secrets, nurturing, teaching us to listen.
Steffie Yee spent many years gathering stories and images of her family’s history in the town of Branxton, NSW where her parents successfully ran a Chinese restaurant. Yee’s solo exhibition Chinese Restaurant Playground, which celebrates playfulness and joy, recently opened at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery.
In an era of information excess and manipulation, Wang Zhiyuan’s Dictator Training Centre exhibiting at Passage Gallery, reminds us of contemporary art’s potential as an open-ended platform for reflection, dialogue, and shared authorship.
In our ongoing series, Shelf Portraits, Art Guide writers recommend the books—recently published or deserving of more attention—that shed new light on an idea that has long simmered in the art world or has helped them see a familiar medium in a different light.
With works from Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin, Betty Pumani and Robert Fielding, Aboriginal-owned Mimili Maku Arts’ first exhibition with Ames Yavuz is an opportunity to celebrate the milestone of their 20 year anniversary, as well as the ways of working that are integral to the centre and Aṉangu culture.
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
Curator and proud palawa/pallawah woman, Dr Jessica Clark’s latest exhibition In the air at The Substation connects First Nations and non-First Nations artists in a response to human consumption and environmental destruction through reflection, resistance and redirection.
