Span brings together five artists based in Perth and Fremantle, to examine movement and distance. Curator Ric Spencer describes the exhibition as “a response to contemporary issues of globalisation”: it deals with boundaries mapped and crossed, and boundaries impossible to cross.
Whilst the exhibition examines the global, it returns repeatedly to the subject of the human body. In Olga Cironis’s Mountain of Words, hair from thousands of participants is woven into a ribbon, growing further while in the gallery. In Tanya Lee’s video work Curtilage, a person in one house brushes the hair and teeth of a person in the one next door, using an ad hoc extended device to traverse the ambiguous space – the ‘curtilage’ – between two homes.
In Andrew Sunley Smith’s sculptural works, the forms of machine parts are replicated from burnt wood. Sunley Smith draws on his own experiences living o -grid to examine the use of finite resources.
A global experience is made personal in Clyde McGill’s interactive performance work Dolorosa. In the story of a family, forcibly displaced and searching for a safe home, McGill’s suite of paintings function as back- drops and as stations, stopping points within a narrative. Overhead wires are attached to amplifiers and ‘played’ with sticks by the audience, who become complicit in the displacement.
Moving at once outwards and inwards, Span wrestles with ever-present conflicts and intimacies, measuring the distance between bodies.
Span
Fremantle Arts Centre
4 February – 26 March
Interview with curator Ric Spencer:
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.
Anador Walsh reviews Ivan Cheng’s performance exhibition NP at Monash University Museum of Art—a three-day project, made in collaboration with a group of Year 11 students, that explores the loss of childhood innocence and role of documentation in performance.
Trevor Vickers reflects on his six-decade career in hard-edged abstraction, the value that Perth’s light offers painters, and how his latest exhibition at Art Collective WA focuses on a series of quieter works.
Lismore Regional Gallery is reopening to the public following extensive closure resulting from the devastating floods in 2022. The redesigned space will host a number of new exhibitions opening this weekend.
