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Jezz Day Out - MPAC

Visual Arts

Peter Tyndall

Buxton Contemporary
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31 January 2023
Installation view of Peter Tyndall exhibition (photograph by Christian Capurro)
Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary, they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consistency over the past fifty years. ... (read more)

Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision

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20 December 2022
Mandy Martin, Unknown Industrial Prisoner, 1977 (photograph by Andrew Curtis)
Before environmental psychologist Glenn Albrecht gave us the language of solastalgia, Mandy Martin painted Depaysement (2003). Martin chose a different word that also explores a sort of longing for a home that was no longer there, a safe place that predated the environmental destruction that rendered home unrecognisable. ... (read more)

Data Relations

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
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20 December 2022
Zach Blas, Metric Mysticism: A Troll’s Tale, 2022 (photograph by Andrew Curtis)
Is there now an elemental quality to data? Amazon and Meta have certainly demonstrated that data can be harnessed like a natural resource. Yet given that we, the users, shed data at an uncontrollable and unknowable rate, perhaps Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are not twenty-first century oil barons so much as the managers of a silkworm farm? Is all this data just simply information? Do we even have a right to claim it back? ... (read more)

Retainers of Anarchy

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06 December 2022
Howie Tsui 'Retainers of anarchy' 2017 (video still), Art Gallery of New South Wales
Outlaw, the opening exhibition of the purpose-built new media gallery at Sydney Modern, (the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new extension) features Howie Tsui’s mesmerising multimedia installation, Retainers of Anarchy. On a 27.4-metre long, 3.85-metre high projection, which simulates the form of a scroll painting, hundreds of images hand-drawn in ink are animated into a kaleidoscope of supernatural severed heads, grotesque tortures, and characters familiar from wuxia (martial arts) novels and television series. These fantastical images jostle with motifs of everyday life in Hong Kong and iconic figures from the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and were later to erupt in the all-out rebellion in 2019 and its violent suppression by Xi Jinping’s government. ... (read more)

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium

Heide Museum of Modern Art
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22 November 2022
Barbara Hepworth, Eidos 1947, National Gallery of Victoria
‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves breathe, palpitating with a sense of their own inner vitality. ... (read more)

Fred Williams: The London Drawings

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07 November 2022
Fred Williams, Elephant,1953 (National Gallery of Victoria)

How rare an experience it is to be in an exhibition where you feel you are in the presence of the artist at work. It is as if you are watching the artist’s hand and eye moving swiftly in perfect unison as he outlines the object of his intense looking, repeating contours, making corrections, starting afresh, appearing to breathe life into his subjects, and thinking all the while.

... (read more)

Orienteering: Painting in the Landscape edited by Heather Briggs

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September 1983, no. 54
John Landvogt reviews 'The Artist & The River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven' by Sandra McGrath and 'Orienteering: Painting in the Landscape' edited by Heather Briggs

In 1968, at the time of the Field Exhibition, Regionalism in painting was not a respectable concept. Not one painting in that exhibition related in any way to place. Internationalism was paramount. Now fifteen years later, even such localised phenomena as the highly stylised spray-can graffiti of the New York subways has infiltrated easel painting and the art galleries of that city, once the capital of Internationalism.

In Australia, as styles flourished and died with rapidity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of important painters continued to work, not only with ‘recognisable shape’ as advocated by the Antipodeans, but with one particular form of it, the landscape.

... (read more)

Light: Works from Tate’s Collection

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12 July 2022
‘Light: Works from Tate’s Collection: The power of illumination’ by Sophie Knezic

The allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic represents Western metaphysics’ defining narrative on the nature of light. In this famous fable of shackled prisoners, humankind is confined to a realm of falsity and shadow from which they can only escape by breaking free into the light of day, where the power of illumination reveals the truth of the world.

... (read more)

The Milk of Dreams

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07 June 2022
‘The Milk of Dreams: The return of the Venice Biennale’ by Iva Glisic

The 59th Venice Art Biennale is an invitation to imagine. After the pandemic caused the event to be postponed for just the third time in its 127-year history (the other two instances being the two world wars), there was hope at the beginning of the year that this would be ‘the Biennale of rebirth’, marking a return to some kind of normal. Amid widespread global crisis, this could easily be dismissed as an optimistic goal ...

... (read more)

Queer

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29 March 2022
‘Queer: Reappraising the NGV’s heteronormative assumptions’ by Sophie Knezic

We all know that emancipatory drives in the late twentieth century dislodged the hegemonic politics of social normativity through the movements of second wave feminism, civil rights, and gay activism, but it’s worth remembering that some rights took longer than others. Homosexuality was only fully decriminalised in Australia in 1997 (Tasmania being the last state to do so); same-sex marriages were not legalised until 2017.

... (read more)
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