Since Australia’s wealth is largely contingent on what we dig up from under the soil (golden or otherwise), our cities boom or stagnate according to the mining economy. This is despite the fact that many of us in urban areas have never so much as donned a hard hat, let alone set foot on a mine site.
Brisbane artist Lu Forsberg investigates this phenomenon through research into Ecolonomics – a hybrid word that the artist describes as “the nexus of environmental, social, and economic systems.” From open cut mining to urban developments, recorded birdcalls to Google Earth, Forsberg’s practice digs into the compression of our physical relationship to the ground we live on.
The recipient of the 2017 Jeremy Hynes Award, Forsberg is an early-career artist with an exciting experimental practice. Transparency and other worries presents a new body of work at Brisbane’s Institute for Modern Art, in which the artist probes our distanced relationship to mining.
In the video installation Earthwork 3 (assemblage rig) (2017) – which won Forsberg the prize – the artist uses a screen-capture video of Google Earth to take the viewer on a virtual journey through existing mine sites that are currently undergoing rehabilitation. Via a screen set in a construction rig, we traverse these slabs of stripped earth, our bird’s-eye view pointing to the plight of native birds erased from the environment. The endangered southern subspecies of the black-throated finch, threatened by the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, is a specific concern of the artist.
Engaging with the environment through the technology that both connects us to the world and separates us from it, Forsberg presents a compelling, timely body of work.
Transparency and other worries
Lu Forsberg
Institute of Modern Art
5 May – 2 June
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.
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.
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.
For Patrick Pound, whose new installation The Museum of Falling is on show now at the City Gallery, the arrangement of objects and images has long blurred the line between fact and fiction, jolting our perception in surprising and unusual ways.
