VAULT EXTRA 2 DECEMBER 2022
ARNDT ARTBARN
Xiyao Wang’s abstract paintings can best be described as movement captured on canvas. Combining various mediums such as oil and acrylic paint, chalk, graphite and oil sticks, the Berlin-based Chinese artist’s immersive practice pays homage to the expressive sincerity of 20th century modern art. Ten major paintings of Wang’s will be on display at The ARNDT Collection in an exhibition titled The endless dream. With Taoism and post-structuralism, ancient Chinese pictorial traditions, bodywork, dance, martial arts, and the canon of Western art history in mind, these works visually capture our inner visions, bodily perceptions, sensations, and feelings. Boundless and unbridled, each work, with its delicate and deft strokes, unlocks an imaginative space where one is free to venture beyond the depths of the pictorial frame. The endless dream opens 10 December and continues until 24 February 2023.
Image credit: Xiyao Wang, Wandering with the waves no.2, 2022, acrylic, oil stick on canvas, 200 × 190 cm. Courtesy of ARNDT Collection
WARRNAMBOOL ART GALLERY
Popularised during the twentieth century, low budget and self-produced video recordings were readily employed by artists for their affordability. For many working in the context of modern socio-political oppression, this medium presented an opportunity for self-actualisation, self-determination, and community connection. Today, the medium is often employed as a tool for reconsidering and challenging popular notions of gender and drag. The work of national and international artists, CHRISTEENE, Vaginal Davis, The Huxleys, Max Lawrence, and Dyan Tai, in Warrnambool Art Gallerys exhibition Self-Creation illuminates this approach. Offering contemporary understandings of self-creation, the works on display celebrate the limitless intersection between gender and identity. Self-Creation continues until 5 March 2023.
Image credit: CHRISTEENE, T.S.S.P, ft Hotnuts and Stephen Fisherman (film still), 2019. Directed by PJ Raval. Courtesy of Warrnambool Art Gallery
DEL KATHRYN BARTON AT ALBERTZ BENDA
Love Wants to Give on display at albertz benda, Los Angeles, unites Del Kathryn Barton’s distinct visual languages with the notion of art as a life source. The works are laden with the artist’s signature hyperbolic colour-palettes and details, while remaining grounded in earthiness of Australian-alluding flora and fauna. The boundaries between real and dream-state, natural and constructed, internal and external, are interrogated and dissolved by the artist, revealing the space for the transcendent experience of deep connection as all that can be truly known. The exhibition is an intimate, concentrated, distilled essence of Barton’s work – the eruptions of colour, the balance of detailed and broad strokes, and the compositional dream scape reminds any viewer that love wants to give. Love Wants to Give continues at albertz benda until 16 December.
Image credit: Del Kathryn Barton, grieving our sisters, 2022, acrylic on linen, 170.5 x 140 cm; Framed Dimensions: 173 x 142.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and albertz benda, Los Angeles | New York
ROCKHAMPTON WRESTLEMANIA
Professional wrestling is a strange beast. Not quite sport, not quite theatre, it exists in a grey area between forms as a sincere, misunderstood, and yet incredibly self-aware art form. Wrestlemania on display at Rockhampton Museum of Art, is an examination of this compelling and dynamic entertainment by 20 contemporary sculptors, painters, cartoonists and new media artists including Tony Albert, Leah Emery, Julia Higgs, Drew Connor Holland, Freya Jobbins, Ed Luce, Euan Macleod, Ben Quilty, Bruce Reynolds, Jack Rodgers, and Manda Wolf. Curated by Jonathan McBurnie, the exhibition responds to wrestling in all its spectacle, psychology and humour. Wrestlemania continues until 26 February 2023.
Image credit: Freya Jobbins, Batman Mask, 2019, plastic assemblage, 22 x 16 x 6 cm. Courtesy the artist
OTOMYS GREG WOOD
A new exhibition by award-winning Victorian artist Greg Wood, entitled Day In Day Out, is currently on display at Otomys Gallery. Capturing the delicate transitions of the natural world, Day In Day Out is an evocative meditation on the transience of human experience. Within each painting, Wood captures a unique and subjective impression of a single moment, documenting the mood, atmosphere, and energy of this fleeting experience. His primordial landscapes dance between sublimity and melancholy, highlighting the multiplicity of both the land and day-to-day life. Day In Day Out will be on display at Otomys Gallery until 10 December.
Image credit: Greg Wood, V47 Day In Day Out, oil on linen, framed walnut, 77.5 x 92 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Otomys. Photo: Matthew Stanton
CAMPBELLTOWN (KARLA DICKENS)
Bringing together key bodies of work alongside a new series, Embracing Shadows is an important survey exhibition at Campbelltown Arts Centre by Lismore-based Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens. Spanning 30 years of practice, Embracing Shadows showcases the artist’s expansive practice across collage, painting, installation, photography, film and poetry to negotiate a highly personal and political interrogation of Australian culture and history. Embracing Shadows includes seminal works such as Hot Thing (1995), Sheila’s Downunder (2002), Black Madonna (2009) and Bound (2016), as well as select works from the Dickensian Circus and Country Show series (2020–21). Disastrous (2022), a new series by Dickens created in response to the floods that devastated the Northern Rivers in early 2022, will also premier with the exhibition. Embracing Shadows shows at Campbelltown Art Centre from January 3 to March 12, 2023.
Image credit: Karla Dickens, For Sale, 2022, mixed media, 124 x 124 cm; from the series Disastrous, 2022. Courtesy the artist
SCA NEW CONTEMPORARIES
New Contemporaries, presented by Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), The University of Sydney represents SCA’s graduating cohort. Working across Screen Arts, Photography, Painting, Printmedia, Sculpture, Ceramics, Glass and Jewellery and Object, the works within represent the capstone of degrees including the Bachelor of Visual Arts, Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) or Masters of Moving Image. New Contemporaries is on display at The Old Teachers’ College, SCA Gallery, until 10 December.
Image credit:Jacqueline Larcombe, Suburban columns (detail), 2022, acrylic, wood, enamel, canvas. Courtesy of the artist and SCA
COLVILLE GALLERY
Kylie Elkington pictorial world of native Australian plants is treated with a romanticism that recalls the great pre-Raphaelite artists emerging from England in the mid 19th century. Then, as now, the world was in rapid change with the advent of the Industrial revolution, but those artists, and Elkington alike, chose to ignore those temporary troubles nearby, and focus on eternal themes of life cycles and the beauty of nature in its wildest forms. Through a slow visual contemplation of place, viewers of Kylie Elkington’s latest exhibition Native Anew are invited to meditate on the beauty and sensation of the Australian landscape. Transparent glazes, applied over time, record these cumulative sensations, and draw attention to the unique detail and beauty of our native species. Native Anew continues at Colville Gallery until 12 December.
Image credit: Kylie Elkington, Melaleuca Arrangement, Dove Lake, 2022, oil on linen
105 x 95 cm. Courtesy of Colville Gallery.
ART GALLERY OF BALLARAT (BEATING AROUND THE BUSH)
Australian landscape images painted en plein air, or on site, from over 120 years ago still hold a powerful nostalgia for audiences today. Beating Around the Bush brings the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s collection of Australian Impressionist landscape paintings together with female photographers who have re-examined the Australian Impressionists and brought a new lens to the Australian landscape. Themes such as gender, hardship of life in the bush, immigration, urban growth, environmental concerns, and the presence of Indigenous peoples are explored through the work of some of Australia’s most exciting contemporary female artists including Fiona Foley, Jacqui Stockdale, Jill Orr, Maree Clark, Polixeni Papapetrou, Elizabeth Parsons and more. Beating Around the Bush continues until 19 February 2023.
Image credit:Jill Orr, Southern Cross reclaimed 02, 2021, inkjet print on rag paper, 110 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and This Is No Fantasy
