Light Geist presents three new commissions by artists working with video projection. Through immersive animation, data mapping and tanks of swirling mist, the viewer is plunged into a world of ghosts, memory, mysterious illuminations and blazing landscapes.
First-time collaborators, media artist Sohan Ariel Hayes (WA) and senior Martu artist Ngamaru Bidu (WA) to animate Bidu’s paintings of Western Desert country. Bidu’s work frequently depicts the Martu’s controlled burning of the land, taking an aerial view to produce mesmerising canvases awash in flame. Here they will be transformed into a three-dimensional, immersive experience, projected onto the gallery’s floor and walls as viewers walk within an ever-moving fire.
Both Ella Barclay (NSW) and Sam Price (WA) explore the immaterial nature of thought and data in two very different works. Barclay’s installation sees tanks hung from the ceiling in a darkened gallery. In the tracks, swirling with mist, the bodies of swimmers can be made out rising through the surface. These spectral forms, strange ghosts, refer to the shifting nature of thought and memory. Price, on the other hand, moves inwards to the brain, mapping cerebral activity onto a three- dimensional re-creation of brain hemispheres.
Exhibition curator Erin Coates says that the projected light in Light Geist “does not rest lightly on a flat surface” but rather “enlivens architectural space, animates three-dimensional forms, and even makes the ground beneath us seethe”. Engaging and distorting the viewer’s sense of space and place, this exhibition promises a powerfully immersive experience.
Light Geist
Fremantle Arts Centre
19 November – 22 January
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
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 a conversation with Lauren Carroll Harris for her survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Julie Rrap discusses 40 years of challenging the male gaze, and the cultural invisibility of the ageing female body.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
