November 2009 Issue

Deborah Williams
Significant Others: Reflecting on a Relationship

Australian Galleries Works on Paper
November 5 to 28
Sydney

“There has been a long-established visual and literary approach of anthropomorphising the dog,” Deborah Williams says. We have used the dog to represent a metaphor or as symbol and therefore, she fears, denied it a presence as an individual. Christopher Isherwood defined the dilemma when he wrote that we make dogs inhabit two worlds, ours and their own. This is exactly what Deborah tackles in her work... “Are we able to conceive the dog as its own being, outside of its relationship to ourselves?” Her dogs are neither cute nor kitsch nor virtue transmogrified into canine form. They are dogs.
– Christian Kerr, The Australian, October 2009


Deborah Williams, In distant isolation, 2009, collagraph, engraving and etching, edition 12, 48 x 56cm

Texts and Textiles

Ian Potter Museum of Art – The University of Melbourne
October 16 to April 18
Melbourne


Ancient Greek papyrus and fragments of woven Coptic shawls feature in this exhibition that explores how texts and textiles were produced and used in antiquity.
Highlights include papyrus fragments from a book by Thucydides found at Oxyrhyncus and a complete Coptic tunic made from linen and wool with finely embroidered patterns. This exhibition offers a view into the lives of elite as well as average citizens from the Egyptian Nile valley, through the texts and textiles that they read and wore.

Curated by Spencer-Pappas, Trust Curator, and lecturer Dr Andrew Jamieson.


Coptic textile fragment, Egypt, Lower Delta, 7th–8th century CE (detail), the University of Melbourne Art Collection.
Gift of David and Marion Adams

Greg Creek
Amendments

Sarah Scout
October 22 to November 14
Melbourne


Amendments comprises a series of large watercolour works on paper made up of numerous concentric coloured rings. From each ring paint drips and spills, ‘amending’ those rings it traverses as it gravitates down the paper’s surface. Colour drips and spills from the edge of the page, staining the balsa wood tray beneath. The materiality of the drawing and sense of performance is heightened by the play of gravity and drip trails. There is both a pure optical beauty and a strong material presence in these works.


Greg Creek, 3rd Amendment, 2009, watercolour on paper, balsa drip tray, 180 x 120 x 3cm

Irene Barbaris
Apocalypse: Seven Histories into Futures

Arc Biennial: Shed E, Howard Smith Wharves
November 7 to December 29
Queensland


The works in this exhibition explore seven spaces of perception within the Apocalypse. Her interpretations hover between densely minimal and jubilant transparencies. Investigations into the debates surrounding early catacomb art and some of its existential forms throw a particular light on the global issues we are facing today: that of sustaining a world teetering on the brink of environmental chaos and disaster, broken economic and trade systems and a confluence of revealed differences.


Irene Barbaris, Apocalypse: Writings on the Wall (detail), 2009, Space Delawab, Belfast, Northern Ireland, paint and chalk on wall

Timothy Preston
Away With God

Hardware Gallery
November 28 to December 12
Sydney


The culmination of several years’ work, Away With God is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the real and the metaphysical. Preston combines striking juxtapositions of text and imagery to explore existential questions, resulting in works that are at once symbolic and iconic.


Timothy Preston, Untitled (detail), 2009, oil on linen 100 x 120cm

Raquel Ormella
She went that way

Artspace
October 16 to November 14
Sydney


Curated by Reuben Keehan, She went that way posits Ormella’s practice as a sophisticated and evolving process of self-reflection, a means by which the artist attempts to take account of her place as an agent in the world, and to act on it. This is a survey of Ormella’s new and recent projects, alongside works drawn from key periods of her practice, many of which have been revised. This aspect is significant, for as astutely as Ormella engages social questions, her work is characterised by its aesthetic refinement, its critical self-awareness and its persistent consideration of the ethical roles and responsibilities of the artist.


Raquel Ormella, Varied Noisy (detail), 2008, woven badges

Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz and Ludwik Dutkiewicz
Brothers in Arts

Nexus Gallery
October 29 to November 27
South Australia


Post-War Polish migrant brothers Wladyslaw and Ludwik Dutkiewicz held their first Australian exhibition in 1951. Pioneers in the use of abstraction in Australian painting, the brothers were essential contributors to modernism in Adelaide.
“The brothers were advocates of freedom of expression, imagination and experimentation... The art of the Dutkiewicz brothers was profound in its difference and an agent for change...”
– Adam Dutkiewicz, curator and Wladyslaw’s son


Ludwik Dutkiewicz, Indivisible, 1967, oil on composition board, 89 x 100cm

Skin Show

Shifted
October 21 to November 7
Melbourne


Curated by Michael Brennan, Skin Show considers the function of surface, façade and boundary. It posits skin as an ‘in-between space’ and asks, at what point does ‘I’ end and my surroundings begin.
Artists Michael Brennan, Peta Clancy, Juan Ford, Anne Kucera, Natalie Ryan and Andres Uribe-Hidalgo pick up this question and press it to their own skin, returning it with impression, perforation, puncture, superimposition and decay.


Michael Brennan, Art Official, 2009, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 213.5cm

Out of the Dark: the Emotional Legacy of the Holocaust

The Cunningham Dax Collection
Presented in association with the Jewish Holocaust Centre
October 21 to January 23
Melbourne


Out of the Dark brings together artwork by survivors, child survivors and children of survivors of the Holocaust. The drawings, paintings, textiles and sculptures found in this exhibition embody terrible memories, enduring pain and unspeakable loss. These artworks have come from a place of darkness yet they also carry messages of strength and endurance.


Michelle Fox, People I should have known or should have known more (installation detail), 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable

Slow Art Collective
TS2

Bus Gallery
November 24 to December 11
Melbourne


The exhibition is comprised of the documentation, video, catalogue and photographs of the recent show TS2 by Slow Art Collective - Tony Adams, Chaco Kato, Ash Keating and Dylan Matorell. Video documentation by Zoe Turner.


Slow Art Collective, 2009, ewaste, plastics

Ben de Nardi
AWESOME Garage Sale

The Library Artspace
October 28 to Novmber 14
Melbourne


AWESOME Garage Sale re-presents a bizarre accumulation of contemporary totems and artifacts. De Nardi has always been interested in the environment and our impact on it. Combining the recycled with the new (read cheap and nasty), de Nardi explores the materials of daily urban life to produce a series of objets d’art that are symptoms of our time.


Ben de Nardi, Can’t see the trees for the wood, 2009, wooden objects, dimensions variable

Heja Jung
Trace Elements: Dunmoochin Bush Project

Ochre Gallery
October 29 to November 22
Melbourne


Dunmoochin, the artists’ community at Cottles Bridge north of Melbourne founded by Clifton Pugh in the 1950s, continues to play a major role in the evolution of the modernist tradition of landscape painting. Resident artist, Japanese born Korean-Australian artist, Heja Jung’s paintings bear witness to her intense and intimate day-to-day relationship with Dunmoochin’s unique, largely unspoilt bushland environment. Jung not only explores the visual character of the bush with it’s mysterious beauty, form and textures, but is moved by its innate life struggle, tenacity and resilience.


Heja Jung, Light Inside, 2009, oil on canvas 107 x 77cm

Marie-Jeanne Hoffner and Stephen Garret
After the Goldrush

Conical Inc.
October 10 to November 7
Presented in association with Melbourne International Arts Festival


Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, BS1 Project, Bristol, UK, 2008

Women in the Bible: Tricksters, Victors & (M)others

Jewish Museum of Australia
October 15 to March 14
Melbourne


Juxtaposing historical artworks, (including Chagall and Rembrandt) with new works by a range of female artists (including Julie Dowling, Sue Saxon and Anne Zahalka), curator Rebecca Forgasz examines representations of women in the Bible and questions traditional notions of femininity. It is likely to cause discomfort for traditionalists as iconic images of biblical women are expanded on, revised and subverted. Forgasz claims that “despite the predominant secularism of modern society, the religious, political and cultural impact of the Bible endures.”


Julie Dowling, Esther, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 71 x 91cm
Image courtesy the artist

Jeff Gardner
Fragments of Landscape

Cascade Print Workshop
October 23 to December 19
Victoria


The genre of the figure in the landscape is the major theme in the new paintings and prints by Jeff Gardner. He has been exploring this notion in graphic form over many years. His imaginary landscapes use symbols of home, family, and objects from ordinary life.


Jeff Gardner, Return of the Swallows, 2008, oil on canvas, 20 x 20cm

Juan Ford
Figuration Overhaul

Jan Manton Art
November 4 to 28
Queensland


“Take three of the daggiest bits of Australian art: landscape painting, figuration, and botanical illustration. yawn. But if you coarsely merge them all together... ah.”
– Juan Ford on his latest series ‘Figuration Overhaul’, which is an acute and relentless comment on our evolutionary process and it’s not-so-perfect outcomes.


Juan Ford, Misunderstanding Everything, 2009, oil on linen, 70 x 122cm

Williams River Valley Artists’ Project

Muswellbrook Regional Arts Center
October 24 to November 29
New South Wales


Near Barrington Tops lies the Williams River valley of rich dairy pastures, old growth forest and national park. The proposed Tillegra Dam, the size of Sydney Harbour, will flood the valley, destroy the farms, the forest and its unique ecosystem and another sacred site will be lost.
Initiated by artist Juliet Fowler Smith – whose family has farmed the valley for generations – this project brings together a group of environmentally-dismayed Australian contemporary artists. Their elegiac, contemplative and strident responses are being fuelled by local residencies, research and exhibitions starting in 2009.

Artists include Suzanne Bartos, Neil Berecry Brown, Ruby Davies, Bonita Ely, Juliet Fowler Smith, Noelene Lucas, Bridget Nicholson, Margaret Roberts, Toni Warburton and David Watson.


Suzanne Bartos, Riverbeds, 2009, digital photograph