In the 10 years since its establishment, Bogong Centre for Sound Culture has earned a justified reputation across Australia and beyond as an institution devoted to the theory, politics, aesthetics and technology of sound art. However, survey exhibition Notes from the Field is above all a meditation on the Centre’s local landscape: the Bogong High Plains and Kiewa Valley in northeast Victoria, home of the Bidhawal, Dhudhuroa, Gunaikurnai and Nindi-Ngudjam Ngarigu Monero peoples.
The exhibition features the work of 15 artists who have undertaken residencies at the Centre in the remote Victorian Alps. “Together they represent a range of responses to the region’s natural, anthropogenic and atmospheric characteristics,” says Phillip Samartzis who, in partnership with Madelynne Cornish, has run the Centre since its inception. Through “field recordings made across the region,” the exhibition’s sonic component captures transformations and habitat loss from climate change, wildfires and “the impact of new hydropower stations on landscape ecology.”
In addition to works installed at MAMA, the exhibition includes pieces commissioned for an accompanying website. Both platforms “explore the process of field work and how it is translated into final resolved work,” Samartzis explains, with the website expanding on “artistic processes, observations and field documentation.”
Samartzis and Cornish’s own work is exhibited alongside contributions from an international range of practitioners, from Denmark’s Adam Pultz Melbye to the American Shannon Lee Collis. But despite these global flavours, the exhibition remains a distinct expression of locality.
“Anyone who visits Notes from the Field will be struck by the way the region has been represented,” says Samartzis. “It reveals the unheard and overlooked, to render the Victorian Alps anew for audiences.”
Notes from the Field: Bogong Centre for Sound Culture
Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA)
26 February—27 June
This article was originally published in the May/June 2021 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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 Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
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.
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.
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.
