Artists
Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew is a Melbourne based artist who works with neon, installation, photo-media, mixed-media, performance and video. Andrew challenges cultural and historical perception, using text and image to comment on local and global issues regarding race, consumerism and history.
Benjamin Armstrong
Benjamin Armstrong's glass and wax sculptures 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'. Benjamin Armstrong’s glass and wax sculptures slide between the homely and the uncanny. Dr Kyla McFarlane, Swells and Shudders, Before the body - Matter, Works from the Monash University Collection 2006
Peter Atkins
Artist Peter Atkins' bold abstractions on canvas and multi panelled journals utilise the ephemera of his travels - everything from buttons to bottle tops and sequins. Hidden amidst the strange forms are indigenous artefacts and the odd deviations of Outsider Art. Atkins is an alchemist mixing condom wrappers, messages from fortune cookies, lotto tickets, confetti ... 'not just things, but loaded things,' writes Max McLean, 'that speak of chance or destiny, birth and death, form and entropy ...' Atkins' collecting, arranging, repeating and copying hand injects rhythm into detritus, creates order out of chaos.
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 Tegant, Depth of Field, 2002)
Adam Cullen
Early in his career, Adam Cullen became renowned as an enfant terrible in the Australian art world. He has never been afraid to skirt around danger in his aesthetics and his practice. He gained early fame in his art school days by dragging a rotting pig's head around chained to his ankle. He raised eyebrows by collaborating with the infamous Mark 'Chopper' Read for their children's book, Hooky the Cripple. He was well established as a Sydney 'grunge' artist when he won the prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of actor David Wenham in 2000, raising hackles amongst the more conservative members of the Australian art world. But regardless of the bad boy posturings, there is also an extraordinary sense of both humour and pathos about Cullen's work.
Colin Duncan
Night time seems to lurk provocatively in the greater part of Colin Duncan's catalogue of videos, installations and wallworks ... The new wall works, flat templates made from acrylic sheet, enter into the symbolic realm of signage, template decorations, and the now ubiquitous sms shorthand visual menu. But what do they mean? Whereas most pictograms operate within an agreed system of information exchange, Colin's templates seem to me to be either deliberately obtuse or overtly straight-forward ... Titles for these otherwise innocent symbols tend to prove that there are more meanings to be extracted from an encounter with the symbolic. (Juliana Engberg 2004)
Danielle Freakley
Danielle Freakley is a performance artist, sculptor, sound artist, installation artist and drawer. Her interventionist performances involve her developing a semiotic ability/disability throughout daily life, some performances spanning years living in a certain way whenever in public. Danielle Freakley's project, The Quote Generator 2008, includes footage of dozens of conversations in which she attempts to navigate through everyday interactions speaking only in fragments taken from movies and books. .... Somehow Freakley oscillates between being a victim of her own artifice, and because she's chosen her own mode of torture, somehow compellingly free. Adam Jasper Frieze Magazine September 2008
Peter Graham
In the late 1980s Peter Graham's studio at the Victorian College of the Arts was a cascading jumble of strange sculptural forms and piles of paper scrawled with bizarre, alien figures. His notes on tracking a jaguar through the Victorian bush were scattered over many surfaces. Sticks and bones were strewn throughout the space and miniscule robotic figures welded from rusted metal skulked in dark corners. Graham's work rapidly evolved into ferocious drawings. The intensity of the built up surface reduced charcoal and pencil to nubs as the artist trekked through fantastical landscapes. Today Graham continues to act as a conduit: bringing a curious, haunting reality into our banal world.
Brent Harris
Harris is an artist who combines humour with the ability to disturb. His images combine the simplified graphic language of cartooning - usually magnified and cropped - with abstraction. The overall effect is surreal and openly sexual. But the imagery often works only as a lure. More compelling is Harris's subtle and often scintillating feeling for colour. Sebastian Smee, Forget me not, The Australian, August 2008.
Louise Hearman
When an artist concentrates so strongly on elements of reality, they become hyper-real. This is the method used by a filmaker 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. Hearman's 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 animal's 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)
Peter Hennessey
Peter Hennessey is obsessed with the extraordinary products of the space race. His massive 'build your own' Voyager space probe made from plywood and hinges ... and the associated panel works, drawings and video work explore an amazing narrative that brings some of the wilder aspects of the original project into focus. ... the thin edge of fanaticism that underscores this project is brilliantly conveyed. It is an act of homage with his tongue firmly in his cheek. (Ted Snell 2003) Peter Hennessey's My Woomera, another large scale installation incorporating video, was on view at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in December 2004.
Bill Henson
Henson's elegant, formal photographs - of battered landscapes and fragile, wispy youths - resemble nothing so much as Flemish still-lifes; rarely has colour photography captured so profoundly the furry texture of night time. The New Yorker 2004 Bill Henson is a visionary explorer of twilight zones, between nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female. His photographs are painterly tableaux that continue the traditions of romantic literature and painting.
Troy Innocent
Troy Innocent is one of Australia's original cyber artists. His work encompasses sculptural installation, video projection, light works and still images. When Innocent started creating his artificial worlds in 1989 the graphic interface was fresh, crude and alien. Today the power Troy Innocent wields in his virtual universe is immense. Life forms that slink, sigh and soar are the creation of his fingertips on the mousepad. Innocent's sculptures (or 'offline artefacts') inhabit the same space as ourselves and ... we alt tab between the here and now of the gallery to the 'no there, there world' of the virtual. In this liminal space of intervening worlds, which reality is more alive? (Darren Tofts 2002)
Tim Johnson
Often described as 'floating worlds', Tim Johnson's extraordinarily powerful paintings embrace the spiritual iconography of a range of cultures including those of Aboriginal Australia, the Buddhist East and Native America. 'Johnson's 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,' wrote Linda Michael in 2001.
Anastasia Klose
Anastasia Klose's work explores a particular "aesthetic of the pathetic", but not in the derogatory sense that it may first imply. Reviewing her work in NEW07 (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) Jared Davis wrote that: "Klose's self-deprecating artistry reveals a superb talent for the manipulation of her filmic medium. Her dry, apathetic sense of humour is both consciously ironic, and holistically human...Klose's work is not merely provocactive irony, but an exquisitely intrinsic view of people - our strengths and our failures." Klose's video work embodies the "low tech aesthetic that is heralding a wider shift in contemporary Australian art-making practices..." Jo Higgins, Australian Art Collector, Issue 43, 2008
Rosemary Laing
Trained as a painter, Rosemary Laing has explored conceptually based photography and performance since the 1980s. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and across the United States, Europe and Asia. In 2007 a solo exhibition of her work was presented at Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Tennessee, USA. In 2009 her work was included in Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord between Nature and Society at the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, USA. 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.
Christopher Langton
Christopher Langton is a pop sculptor and installation artist who creates 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.'
Tim Maguire
Tim Maguire's paintings and prints are cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich colouration and technical skill. Giant flowers and golden fruit resonate from ambiguous backgrounds. The work is sumptuous, romantic. Shaun Lakin argues that Maguire's painting is 'both historical and contemporary'. But that these modes 'do not exactly co-exist ... they rub up against each other.' Maguire uses digital photographs as source material for his oil paintings. He applies colour separation techniques not unlike those used in commercial printing. The distinction between the digital and the handcrafted is blurred. 'Maguire's surfaces hold these competing formalisms - of the Modernist canvas and the digital print - in close proximity ...'
Patricia Piccinini
Exploring concepts of what is 'natural' in the digital age, Patricia Piccinini brings a deeply personal perspective to her work. Rachel Kent notes: 'Since the early 1990s, Piccinini has pursued an interest in the human form and its potential for manipulation and enhancement through bio-technical intervention. From the mapping of the human genome to the growth of human tissue and organs from stem cells, Piccinini's art charts a terrain in which scientific progress and ethical questions are intertwined.'
Robert Rooney
I have always preferred to work from secondary sources, particularly mass-media ones, rather than paint or draw from the actual subject. Robert Rooney 1986 The sources for Rooney's highly regarded 1960s abstract paintings were breakfast cereal cut-outs and other found material such as knitting patterns. His work changed considerably over the years but the one constant, as Charles Green pointed out in 2000, is a 'love affair with the legible signs of nomadic suburbia (logos, trademarks, street signs).' From the 1990s Rooney's hand-painted acrylic pictures have been based on illustrations in esoteric children's books. More recently he has been concerned with artworks made by children themselves, though it is not his aim to draw or paint like a child.
Caroline Rothwell
Through the creation of her hybrid animals and plants, with their skewed sense of scale and environment - a sort of 'nature on acid' - Rothwell's works interrogate the relationships between humans and the natural environment. Says Curator Clare Lewis, Rothwell devises fantastical species and ambiguous narratives which mimic the naive exuberence of Disney, with a toxic edge... Jo Higgins, Caroline Rothwell, Australian Art Collector, Issue 43, January - March 2008, page 179
David Wadelton
David Wadelton is one of Australia's most renowned Surrealist painters. But he gives a new spin to the term surrealism. Wadelton uses comics, advertising graphics, still life and just about anything that comes to hand, throwing it into a blender and leaving the top open to spray incongruous contrasts and juxtapositions. Recent works utilise computer-based montage. These images take on a manga-like gloss in this new form of cyber-surrealism / popist-postmodernism. 'In fact, it's to film ... that we have to look', writes Charles Green, 'if we want to understand why David Wadelton has arrived, via Old Master painting and Antique statuary, at cartoon characters and garish details drawn from commercial advertising.'
Judy Watson
.jpg)
Australian indigenous art has a broad reputation as being innovative; but few artists are as intriguing as Judy Watson. While her work takes its inspiration from the land and traditions of the Waanyi culture, Watson distils her distinctive stained canvases into poetic abstractions that have the power to speak to all. Margie West comments: 'Even though the messages in her work are often tough, they are conveyed in an almost subliminal and subtle way, to be discovered in the layering of the surface and the imagery that floats mirage-like on it.'
Constanze Zikos
Constanze Zikos deconstructs the 'cheaper' elements of suburban Greek culture in Australia. His kitsch colouration simultaneously leads geometric abstraction in new directions - combining the timelessness of Classical Greek design with the disposable aesthetic of laminex. Sue Cramer notes: 'Zikos' art mingles the sacred with the secular, the symbolic with the decorative, the real with the fake, the culturally specific with the abstract and universal.' Signature materials - laminex, velvet, glomesh, perspex - are used to make a wide variety of work from paintings, to soft sculptures and minimalist objects. Zikos' glitzy, streetwise sensibility delights in the 'neo', the fake, revived, popularised and imitated.
Info:
The software that is presenting you this document currently does not support either JavaScript, CSS, or the Macromedia Flash Player 7. This site also features a Flash version that requires afore mentioned technologies. You may download the latest Flash Player Plugin here for free.
