Tag: photography
William Yang: Seeing & Being Seen
Monday, April 5th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,William Yang is a Sydney institution but a Queenslander born and bred. Last week he was reclaimed by his state of origin for a retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery that allows us to read one artist’s career as a tale of social evolution. Even allowing for the wrong turnings of the present day, over […]
Bill Henson
Saturday, March 13th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A new exhibition by Bill Henson is always an event – an eruption of the extraordinary into the fabric of everyday life. That hyper-productive philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, suggests that for most people the fundamental earth-shattering event is falling in love. Why would we describe this process as a “fall” if it wasn’t in some way […]
Thresholds
Friday, February 19th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Thresholds is the very model of an underground art exhibition. Between 2016-19 Julia Davis and Lisa Jones explored the subterranean spaces near St. James Station, taking photographs, shooting video and making unconventional large-scale drawings. The results of their investigations are displayed at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University. There’s an intrinsic fascination in such a […]
Michael Zavros, Gunybi Ganambarr, Li Jin
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Michael Zavros is a very 21st century artist. Known for a fastidious, hyperreal style of painting and a preoccupation with fashion and luxury goods, he would have been anathema in those days when the avant-garde strove to make art that was not a marketable commodity. Marketability is Zavros’s great and abiding theme, although he comes […]
Lisa Reihana – Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Lisa Reihana Lives: Freeman’s Bay, Auckland, New Zealand Age: 55 Represented by: Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert (No Melbourne representation) Her thing: Dramatic, editioned photos derived from a large-scale 3D immersive film. Our take. Lisa Reihana has been making theatrical, multi-media works on Pacific themes for decades, but after her large-scale video projection, in Pursuit of […]
Koo Bohnchang
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“In matters of art,” wrote the erudite poet, Paul Valéry, “erudition is a sort of defeat.” The argument is that the freshness of first perceptions may be destroyed by specialised knowledge. Imagine, for example, an expert on ceramics standing in front of a great piece of pottery. There are questions about where and when the […]
Shadow catchers
Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In Adelbert von Chamisso’s gothic tale, Peter Schlemihl, the hero sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for a purse perpetually filled with gold, but all the wealth in the world is not enough to compensate for the horror he inspires when his lack of a shadow is noticed. For “shadow” we might read […]
David Goldblatt: Photography & Truth
Friday, August 9th, 2019 Blog,David Goldblatt will always be known as the photographer who exposed the evils of Apartheid to the world, but to characterise him as a ‘political’ artist is to diminish the breadth of his achievements. This is something Goldblatt has in common with all great photographers who have found their subjects in war, poverty, hatred and […]
Tracey Moffatt & Kartika Kain
Thursday, July 18th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,On a rare week when I was able to get back to the commercial galleries there were a few tempting propositions. Chief among them, Peter Godwin’s Mask, Music and Studio at Defiance at Mary Place (until 25 July) – a really tough collection of still lifes that push the boundaries of the genre, picking up […]
Dina Goldstein – Lyons Gallery, Sydney
Saturday, May 18th, 2019 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Dina Goldstein Lives: Vancouver, Canada Age: 49 Represented by:Lyons Gallery, Paddington, Sydney (Plus galleries in USA, Canada, UK, Italy, France and Portugal) Her thing.Humorous-but-serious, elaborately staged colour photographs on the theme of religion in a secular world. Our take.Every year Sydney’s Head-On Photo Festival gets bigger and more ambitious. Among a range of leading […]