2009
2009
White Hot: Contemporary Australian Glass
White Hot highlights the works of eight internationally renowned and celebrated Australian glass artists, reflecting on a moment in time by considering contemporary practitioners who challenge the traditional ideas, methods, and materials of glass making.
Curators: Barbara McConchie, CraftACT; Ann Jackle, Canberra Glassworks; Sarah Bond, Asialink
Artists: Nadege Desgenetez, Wendy Fairclough, Deirdre Feeney, Jessica Loughlin, Tom Moore, Brenden Scott French, Itzell Tazzyman and Janice Vitkovsky.
Exhibition dates & venues:
Bangkok: 8 January - 30 January 2009, Silpakorn Gallery, Silpakorn University
Hanoi: 19 June – 28 June 2009, Vietnam Fine Art Museum
Taiwan: 24 July - 27 September 2009, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts
White Hot: contemporary Australian glass is presented in partnership with leading arts organisations Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre and Canberra Glassworks.
The invited artists, Nadege Desgenetez (ACT), Wendy Fairclough (SA), Deirdre Feeney (VIC), Jessica Loughlin (SA), Tom Moore (SA), Brenden Scott French (SA), Itzell Tazzyman (ACT) and Janice Vitkovsky (SA), all explore themes of narrative, nostalgia and challenge the notions of what glass can be.
In recent years, contemporary Australian glass artists have received unprecedented acclaim in the international arena. However, the focus has been more prevalent in the United States of America and Europe, rather than in Asia. White Hot celebrates the strength of Australian creative glass practice and industry with this dedicated glass exhibition, the first to be toured by Asialink through Asia, revealing the vibrancy and dynamism current within contemporary glass practice in Australia.
These eight artists demonstrate that whether it is expertly blown, meticulously engraved, production work or conceptual art, glass is a super-cooled mercurial substance that resists classification.
Erased: Contemporary Australian Drawing
You pass through an ever present past. Lou Reed from Magic and Loss (1992)
To erase is to change. As an inherent part of the creative methodology of drawing, this exhibition highlights how erasure is a generative strategy, one that proposes a future of political, social, environmental and aesthetic transformations. In some works, erasure acts as a mode of expression or it operates by layering the past with the present or as a proposition about action and trace. In each case, it operates as some kind of palimpsest.
A palimpsest is traditionally understood as a manuscript upon which a text has been incompletely or wholly erased to make space for another text. However, the word has developed a number of meanings across different fields. More broadly, it can refer to any object or place that reflects its history – the traces of buildings in ruins are a prime example – the past physically embodied in the present. In each definition, a palimpsest is a densely articulated practice of marking, erasing and rewriting, layering moments in time, one over the other, producing a complicated texture of spatiality and temporality – an ever present past.
Interpreted in this way, one can posit that, of the works in this exhibition, Christian Capurro’s function more literally as a palimpsest while Tom Nicholson’s and Raquel Ormella’s employ it as a mode of expression, referencing the past by way of visual fragments, and in the work of Vernon Ah Kee, Simryn Gill and Jonathan Jones, erasure and layering also suggest productive dimensions of meaning and transformation.
ARTISTS: Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Capurro, Simryn Gill, Jonathan Jones, Tom Nicholson, Raquel Ormella.
CURATOR: Natasha Bullock, Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.
TOUR: Singapore, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen (2009-2010)
Under My Skin
The exhibition Under My Skin selected five artists from the hundreds who had undertaken Asialink Artists Residencies in Asia over the 20 years of the program, to reflect the influence and variety of that experience on their work – how the experience had got ‘under their skin’. Each of the five disparate artists (who had been to the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, India, Singapore and Korea) reveal a unique understanding of the worlds in which they were immersed, worlds unknowable to the passing tourist or the casual observer. The exhibition attracted over 14,000 visitors. In Seoul it was part of Platform Seoul 2009 a major annual international art event, directed and curated by Kim Sun Jung, who had been involved with the earlier Asialink projects, Tracey Moffatt (1999) and Unhomely (1998).
Curators: Sarah Bond, Georgia Sedgwick
Artists: Emil Goh, David Griggs, Pat Hoffie, Megan Keating and Louise Paramor
Tour: Manila, Singapore, Seoul (2008-2009)