Dreams and the subconscious are themes Joel Crosswell returns to often. His drawings and sculptures reference biographical events with a dreamlike sensibility where abstract elements of the natural world filter through his images. One of Crosswell’s better-known pieces is a suite of drawings depicting a tiny endangered fish, the Clarence galaxias. Drawn by Crosswell as part fish part human, figures like his humanoid galaxias are a mainstay of his imagery and evoke the chimeras sketched into the margins of medieval texts.
Crosswell’s galaxias figures were inspired in part by his participation in a wilderness arts residency at Tasmania’s remote and aptly named Skullbone Plains. Home to wedge-tailed eagles, spotted quolls and pillowy beds of sphagnum moss, there is an overwhelming sense of the unknown in Skullbone’s ancient moorlands. It is this sense of the unknown that continues to pervade Crosswell’s work and in Anonymous Souls, which he blends with symbolic references to psychoanalysis and cultural beliefs.
As a result, Crosswell’s images are figuratively surreal and his protagonists appear as delicately hued, humanlike apparitions with limbs billowing as though caught on a breeze. Several sculptures of faces are covered with rainbow paint that appears frozen in mid-drip, like melting ice cream.
While Crosswell’s figures are colourfully appealing, they remain at the edge of the unfamiliar, creating a visual tension that hints at darkness and uncertainty.
In the artist statement for Anonymous Souls, Crosswell describes his work as “spontaneous and unpredictable.” Yet amongst the chaos of colour and line, there remains a refined containment that casts these figures into strangely sublime forms.
Anonymous Souls
Joel Crosswell
Bett Gallery
9 March – 29 March
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
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.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
