On the face of it the performance was benign: an ‘interactive kid’s storytelling’ event scheduled for 2pm by Miss Kandinsky, abbreviated to Miss K to make her pseudonym more manageable for its young audience, presented at the NSW Art Gallery Open Day last Sunday. ‘Miss K’ shortly advised us, with her neat footsteps and...
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Joan Ross’ “Enter at Your Own Risk” at GBK looks like the living room of a poor man’s King Midas. The objects within it do not betray great wealth. The room is a patchwork of stylistically diverse commodity culture, kitsch, and cheap decorative home-ware seemingly selected by a sentimental taste with a cheap sense...
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Damian Dillon’s work involves defacing documentary photographs of banal subjects, inserting crude human gesture into the austere distance of the photographic picture plane. The results have always been unnerving compositions of powerful effect that I could apprehend intuitively, but have never quite understood. I knew that I liked them but I could never locate...
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David Elliot, in the preamble to the 17th Biennale of Sydney, declares his intentions: “Stereotypical rankings of power and periphery, developed and undeveloped, rich and poor, first people and colonisers, ‘fine’ art and ‘folk’ art are here turned on their heads in an exhibition in which the only discrimination is whether the art is...
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Decorating Loos explores the aesthetic impulse through the prism of one of its most basic forms – the desire to embellish the lavatory walls with the mark of our distracted fancy. It does this quite literally through the construction of 15 toilet cubicles in the gallery, each of which is given to an artist...
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Merlin Carpenter’s “The Opening” is in fact an art opening. Usually staged at an up-market gallery, the event takes place during the “private view” that is held prior to the public opening, and reserved for collectors likely to purchase works. The gallery walls are hung with blank canvases, the fine quality of which is...
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AT THE VANISHING POINT – CONTEMPORARY ART 565 King st. Newtown 20 May to 30 May Opening 6:00pm Thu 20 May The emergent in art is usually considered in terms of individual talent or intellectual and aesthetic trends. Emergency Display instead attempts to survey and remark upon a region of our city that seems...
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The idea for a show of photomedia that excluded the human form came out of two related frustrations I have with this medium. The first is the dominance of the human figure within the commercial and popular photographic industry and the second is the self-congratulations with which much contemporary theory and some of the...
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Since my last post was spent railing against the ineluctable, silent efficiency of that juggernaut of institutional change, Anita Taylor and her plans to turn a dinosaur into a jet airplane with no other tools than a calculator and a carving knife – I thought it only appropriate to dedicate this post to the...
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So, the gallows are working again at the old Darlinghurst Goal and the Sydney art community is abuzz with the collective silence that surrounds the radical overhaul of one its major institutions. It’s true that Jacques Delaruelle wrote a letter, at once eloquent and toothless, The Australian published a non-committal story basically reporting that...
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