PETER CALLAS, If Pigs Could Fly [still], 1987, single channel video work, duration: 4:20 mins.
Pioneering video artist PETER CALLAS is on show in the programme 'SHAPESHIFTERS' screening this week at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, as part of the 'The National: Australian art now'.
ONE DAY ONLY! Saturday 3 June 2023, 11am & 2pm.
See 'If Pigs Could Fly' (1987) by Callas, alongside films by Arthur and Connie Cantrill, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, and Tracey Moffatt.
PETER CALLAS is featured in Cognitive Dissidents: Reasons to be Cheerful, now open at Griffith University Art Museum. The exhibition examines the experimental practices central to the development of the video medium in Australian from the 1970s to the 1990s.
"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Callas' work was often cited as a paradigm case of 'postmodern aesthetics' whereby video and digital technologies provided a means for the rapid, freewheeling interrelation of all kinds of imagery; this was supposedly aid and abet the developments of that shrinking, borderless, increasingly multicultural, globe. And it's easy to see how Callas' videos embody this potential, as they set in train elements drawn from various cultures, side-by-side, overlapping, fast and furious throbbing montage. Callas himself cites Japanese advertising as the protean form of this burgeoning aesthetic..."
- Stuart Koop, 2002
The exhibition continues until 9 April.
![Peter Callas, Neo-Geo: An American Purchase , 1990, CVI work, New York [still] 9:17 min](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54012345e4b0f72d40b6c44e/1582338004023-BJJ1KPTW4290T1A3MO6N/Callas+Neo-Geo.jpg)
![Peter Callas, Night’s High Noon: An Anti-terrain , 1988, CVI work, Sydney [still] 7:26 min](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54012345e4b0f72d40b6c44e/1582338012059-QM2MQCRRKRKPWRMRYDWY/Callas+High+Noon.jpg)
Peter Callas, Night's High Noon: An Anti-Terrain, 1988 (video still)
Anne Scott Wilson, Conversation, 2008 (video still)
PETER CALLAS, EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS and ANNE SCOTT WILSON are included in Red Green Blue: A History of Australian Video Art at the Griffith University Art Gallery.
Curated by Matthew Perkins, the exhibition features over 60 works from the 1970s through to the present day. This major survey takes the viewer on a historical journey, while at the same time celebrating the ongoing dynamism and depth of video art practice in Australia.
Eugenia Raskopoulos, rootreroot & routreroute, 2016. installation view Tarrawarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation. Photo: Andrew Curtis
The exhibition will run from 30 March - 8 July 2017.
Peter Daverington, Uncle Bob, 2012, oil on canvas, 91x61cm.
A WORLD APART, ARC ONE Gallery (29 Jan - 1 March 2014)
Curated by Annabel Holt and Anabelle Lacroix
Reviewed in The Age, Arts and Entertainment, 'In the Galleries', 15 Feb 2014.
'A WORLD APART: The pliability of history, the body and the environment are central to ARC ONE'S first group show of the year. Featuring works held in major collections or featured in major institutional shows - courtesy of gallery artists Julie Rrap, Pat Brassington, Anne Zahalka, Peter Callas, Peter Daverington, Rose Farrell and George Parkin - A WORLD APART offsets the performative with the visceral, the landscape with the surreal. Daverington's Uncle Bob is a single work in three parts and three mediums. We're presented with a surrealist phizog painted in the artist's devastatingly meticulous manner, neighboured by an animated video work featuring the same character and a photographic print made from a video still. Callas' chromogenic print, Japanese Uncle Sam, deals in a kind of cultural and historical mutation that invokes the cultural schema under-pinning an occupied post-war Japan.'
- Dan Rule
To read the article click here.
Peter Callas, Japanese Uncle Sam, (Neo Geo Squareize Series), 100 x 100cm, chromogenic print edition of 10, 2003.
A WORLD APART, ARC ONE Gallery, 29 JANUARY - 1 MARCH 2014
Curated by Annabel Holt and Anabelle Lacroix
Julie Rrap, Anne Zahalka, Peter Daverington, Rose Farrell/George Parkin, Peter Callas & Pat Brassington.
A WORLD APART is a group exhibition selected from the diverse ranks of ARC ONE’s artists, presenting key works across various media.
A WORLD APART plays at dissecting and re-representing reality, conceptually and aesthetically. Through this re-construction, attention is called to that which displaces our ingrained perceptions; the boundaries shift, a duality emerges, exploring the constant challenge between seeing and understanding.
Comprised of highly significant pieces, the works in A WORLD APART are all either included in large collections or featured in institutional exhibitions in Australia or internationally. For example, Farrell and Parkin’s Elastic Electromagnetic Waves (2010) is in the collection of The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra and their Unforseen Circumstances, Act Two (2004/05) is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, together with Julie Rrap’s Camouflage #4 (Eiko) (2000). One of Peter Callas’ video works from the Anti-Terrain series has been shown at the Museum of Art (MOMA), New York and Anne Zahalka’s The Cleaner (1986) is in the collection of the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA). Pat Brassington’s work The Wedding Guest is currently on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), in the collections of Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Art Gallery of South Australia and the Horsham Regional Art Gallery.