April
Rosemary Laing
Rosemary Laing is a photo-based artist. Her projects are most often created in relation to cultural and/or historically resonant locations throughout Australia. With interventions undertaken in situ or through the use of choreographed performance work, she engages with the politics of place and contemporary culture.
The Unquiet Landscapes of Rosemary Laing, a major survey of her work was held at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2005 and travelled to Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark in 2006. TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria presented a major survey of Rosemary Laing’s work in 2018, consisting of 28 large-scale works spanning a 30-year period.
Download the skyground catalogue essay. (2019)
Download the poems for recent times essay (2021)
Read swansongs media release (2024)
April
Christopher Langton
Christopher Langton is a pop sculptor and installation artist who creates gigantic plastic blow-up ‘toys’ of frightening proportions.
Curator Mark Feary comments: Langton’s work makes you feel good, but only sort of. Indeed there is something ominous about these sculptures despite their bright colours, smiling faces and fun media. They blend the playful naivety of Betty Boop and Astro Boy with the more knowing aesthetic palette of Roy Lichtenstein. Langton breathes plastic life into bobbing and bopping figures like a Geppeto gone mad. Dazzling wall works (popoptic bubbles) are swoon material – Highly toxic in nature and highly toxic in effect.
Acclaimed for his large scale installations, Christopher Langton has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas.
Click to download the Bad Biology catalogue from the Melbourne Art Fair 17–20 February 2022
View the catalogue from the 2021 Colonies exhibition at Hazelhurst Arts Centre. NSW.
Click to download the 2019 Colony exhibition essay by Sophie Knezic, or the media release.
March
Tim Johnson
Often described as floating worlds, Tim Johnson creates extraordinarily powerful paintings that embrace the spiritual iconography of a range of cultures including those of Aboriginal Australia, the Buddhist East and Native America.
His paintings are landscapes of desire, images of impossible unity, imagined syntheses of cultural and visual systems that freely draw upon images whose meaning we do not necessarily recognise or understand.
Linda Michael, 2001
March
Brendan Huntley
As the saying goes, eyes are the window to the soul. Whether, in placing their eyes, Huntley uncovers the souls in his objects and paintings or gently guides them into being, it is in these apertures that their life force seems to be contained. Before any appraisal of colour, form or texture can be made, you must let them look you in the eye. – Francis. E Parker, Curator, Monash University Museum of Art, 2011
Read the 2018 Sky Light Mind exhibition essay by Danae Valenza or the media release.
Read the 2023 True to Life exhibition essay by Anita Spooner.
March
Peter Hennessey
For all the ‘realism’ of his ‘sculptures’, Peter Hennessy sees his sculptural work as ‘abstraction.’ His is an odd mission to reverse the tendency of the contemporary world to digitize images. He wants to grab back the digital into the ‘real’ world, doing a reverse Alice in Wonderland trick by dragging those things we can only encounter via the media – the digital rabbit hole – back into the lounge room as real, hulking objects.
Ashley Crawford 2005
March
Louise Hearman
When an artist concentrates so strongly on elements of reality, they become hyper-real. This is the method used by a filmmakers such as David Lynch. In Blue Velvet, he turns an ordinary American town into a scene of Gothic menace, focusing on the amplified crunching of insects in suburban lawns or a severed ear lying in the grass. Hearmans paintings can be very Lynch-like in the way she depicts unassuming locations such as a park, a pond, a street or the side of a road, and then introduces a disturbing element.. Her work is distinguished by a very sure and confident touch, even in the smallest details: a patch of light on a cheek or nose, or a glint in an animals eye. In the manner of the greatest painters of the past, Hearman sees light as the key to all forms of painterly expression.
John McDonald, Mistress of Epiphanies, The Australian Financial Review Magazine, March 2004
March
Brent Harris
Brent Harris’ paintings and works on paper are brooding, dripping swamplands delineated in the most meticulous way. Stark planes, often black and white, belie the swooping organic gestures and expressionist shapes.
“Many of his forms vibrate, rise and fall, and cause the viewer’s eye much exercise in following them”, noted James Mollison in Art and Australia.
But what surprises most is the sensuality of the work; as though the sharp lines and immaculate surfaces can barely contain the emotions brooding beneath. This is the Unconscious confronted by a taut, graphic sensibility.
Download the Monkey Business (2022) catalogue essay by Helen Hughes.
Click to download a Q&A between Jane Devery and Brent Harris published August 2021 about The Stations project.
March
Andrew Browne
Mysterious and highly sophisticated, the stylised paintings of artist Andrew Browne are based on his continuing observation of the world through photography. While his recent works are more descriptive than in the past, they continue his fascination with selective vision and the nature of seeing. Using photographs as notations, Browne captures the banal and ordinary and makes strange the familiar.
Louise Tegart, Depth of Field, 2002
March
Peter Atkins
“When I think of the way Peter Atkins works, I am reminded of the great natural historians of the nineteenth century who sought to understand the world around them and the complex relationships that existed within it by looking, collecting, categorising and classifying the specimens they found. Through this process of documenting similarities, identifying patterns and defining difference, they established a rich resource of physical and visual material that provided the basis for their own scientific inquiry and much subsequent understanding. Similarly fascinated by the surrounding world, Atkins looks intently, collects relentlessly and sorts, finding order and variation. His focus is however firmly on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the man-made specimens that are mostly overlooked as ubiquitous elements and detritus of the everyday urban environment.” Kirsty Grant
“When I think of the way Peter Atkins works, I am reminded of the great natural historians of the nineteenth century who sought to understand the world around them and the complex relationships that existed within it by looking, collecting, categorising and classifying the specimens they found. Through this process of documenting similarities, identifying patterns and defining difference, they established a rich resource of physical and visual material that provided the basis for their own scientific inquiry and much subsequent understanding. Similarly fascinated by the surrounding world, Atkins looks intently, collects relentlessly and sorts, finding order and variation. His focus is however firmly on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the man-made specimens that are mostly overlooked as ubiquitous elements and detritus of the everyday urban environment.” Kirsty Grant
February
Benjamin Armstrong
Benjamin Armstrong creates glass and wax sculptures that slide between the homely and the uncanny. Writing about Conflict (Monash University Collection), in which a pair of eyeballs shaped from wax sit at the edge of an egg shaped table top supported by impossibly thin legs, Dr Kyla McFarlane noted that Armstrong triggers both an emotional and intellectual response in viewers … an involuntary physical shudder of horror and delight registers deep in our own bodies.
Dr Kyla McFarlane, Swells and Shudders, Before the body – Matter 2006
Click to the read the essay Contact Images by Quentin Sprague accompanying the Under the Southern Sky (2020) series