Design and Art Australia Online

For the exhibition, Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum, artists Nicole Barakat, Aleshia Lonsdale and Fiona MacDonald apply their creative and investigatory flair to considering a community museum in Kandos about 4 hours west from Sydney. The title asks a central question: how can ordinary lives, then and now, and randomly collected provincial objects, illuminate Big Picture issues?

A Widening Gap: The Intervention, 10 Years On witnesses a world that is remote from the essential services that the rest of Australia takes for granted. The tenth anniversary of the introduction of “the Intervention” — the Northern Territory National Emergency Response — has come and gone.

Elastics / Borracha / Elástico witnesses Timor Leste’s reconstruction through the eyes of four artists who travelled to eleven of the thirteen districts in a mobile residency in late 2012. The artists recorded everyday life and the inspirational work of women weavers and traditional builders whose resilient cultural upkeep subversively aided the forty-year liberation struggle.

Narelle Jubelin, Fiona Macdonald, Maria Madeira and Victor De Sousa involved in a cross cultural project to exhibit in Australia and East Timor. Initiated with a field research trip September 2012.

Ghost Citizens follow us and infiltrate our daily lives. In a continent full of the ghosts and shadows of colonialism, the historical, social, and physical landscape is pitted. Each story is a ghost story loaded with shadows – a kind of ‘scar’ story. Djon Mundine OA

This sampler exhibition and round-table at The Cross Art Projects reviews the Cementa13 experiment — a wildly successful contemporary art festival with a serious theoretical substructure, held recently in Kandos in the NSW tablelands.

This sampler exhibition and round-table at The Cross Art Projects reviews the Cementa13 experiment — a wildly successful contemporary art festival with a serious theoretical substructure, held recently in Kandos in the NSW tablelands.

Feminage frames collage as one aspect of the diverse legacy of feminist art practice. In the 1970s, informed by feminism, gay rights and conceptual art, women artists created a logic of collage, together with a feminine subjectivity composed from alien forms, the domestic and child’s-play associations. Collage’s dynamic, chimerical logic of fragmentation and suture continues to open new angles on sexual, post-colonial and cultural identities.

Let’s play with the conceit that the Occupy actions emanating from Occupy Wall Street are a continuum of conceptual and activist art and critical practice. This is an approach sometimes taken by art historians reviewing responses to May 1968; sit-ins for Peace; the civil rights, women’s rights and environment movements.

Green Bans Art Walk and Exhibition
A collaborative project by The Cross Art Projects and BigFagPress
Green Bans Art Walks presented by Performance Space

Walk speakers: Wendy Bacon, Meredith Burgmann, Christopher Dean, Michael Davies, Jim Donovan, Michael Dysart, Joe Owens, Stacey Miers, Merilyn Fairskye, Ian Milliss and more.

Twining: Weaving and abstraction brings together weaving and abstraction, material and form. Four artists experiment with the nexus between the opposing registers of high and traditional art to explore ideas of cultural circulation and, in this exhibition, the critical process of colonial cultural intersections.

Mulkun Wirrpanda is a renowned Yolngu artist from Blue Mud Bay in NE Arnhem Land and Fiona MacDonald is a balanda (non-Yolngu) artist from Sydney. Their fine and thoughtful works come together to confer on the resonance of symbolic actions on the shoreline and the ensuing miscommunication, misdeeds and corrections.

Here abstracted drawing and restrained colour washes lend a bittersweet nostalgia to the Legend and Legacy series. Nostalgia — from the Greek, literally ‘pain of home’ — prompts uncomfortable memories of a home-town with a proudly independent, left-leaning political culture that is now ailing, its Labour Council and local government squeezed between unscrupulous business interests and Labor Party factions who call the shots and pre-selections from afar.

Curator Jo Holder

Riotous Suburbs presents threads of arguments about the economics and politics of space, housing, distribution and access as governments turn to private market solutions to housing needs. The artists essay the protest and civil unrest that has shadowed a decade of privatisation and great comfort for some.

Utopia Limited adapts the Biennale of Sydney’s ‘Zones of Contact’ theme to question its host city, a place where lifestyle is pathological and the charm of the surface rests on uneasy exclusions. These artists engage with the notion of urban landscape as historic archive. A politics of landscape based on entry or exclusion is brought home.