ANNE ZAHALKA

Anne Zahalka is currently artist in residence at the Bēhal Fejér Institute in Prague.

Anne Zahalka, If these objects could speak [detail], 2018, archival ink on rag paper, each 40 x 32 cm framed

She recently presented an exhibition called The Fate of Things. The works in the exhibition respond to recalled family stories and histories in an attempt to reconnect emotionally with lost family members, particularly Zahalka’s female predecessors. While this exhibition references post-memory and intergenerational trauma, it presents the perspective of an Australian artist whose family relocated from Europe in circumstances that will be relatable to those who have suffered diaspora, trauma or isolation.

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JANET LAURENCE

JANET LAURENCE has collaborated with the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig for an exhibition in Bonn, Nach der Natur. This exhibition makes room for an encounter between life sciences, ethics and art.

Janet Laurence, Nach der Natur installation views, Museum Koenig, 2019

The collaboration follows the painful realisation that humanity has evolved from being an integral part of the community of life to a source of disturbance in nature that does not make appropriate use of its epistemic, moral and aesthetic abilities. In her work, Janet Laurence redirects our view to the community of life, especially to the deep connection between plant and animal life cycles over the millennia.

The exhibition runs until 20th October.

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LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN | ANNE ZAHALKA

Civilization: The Way We Live Now is an international photography exhibition of monumental scale, featuring the work of 100 of the world's finest photographers. LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN and ANNE ZAHALKA are included in this significant exhibition.

Having shown at the major institutions MMCA in Seoul and UCCA in Beijing, Civilization has now landed at the NGV until 2 February 2020.

In this increasingly globalised world, the exhibition explores photographers’ representations of life in cities and presents a journey through the shared aspects of life in the urban environment. The selected works create a picture of collective life around the world and document patterns of mass behaviour. The exhibition looks at the phenomenal complexity of life in the twenty-first century and reflects on the ways in which photographers have documented, and held a mirror up, to the world around us.

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HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT

Honey Long & Prue Stent, Earth Tissue, 2019, archival pigment print, 159 x 106 cm

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT are finalists in the 2019 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award with their work Earth Tissue.

The exhibition will run at Campbelltown Arts Centre from 26 Oct - 5 Dec, with all works available for purchase. It coincides its Campbelltown’s annual Festival of Fisher’s Ghost, a festival dating back to 1956 celebrating Australia’s most famous ghost - Frederick Fisher.

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CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, Topophilia 2, 2019, bronze, Paula Tsui’s cassette tape, crystal, mirror box, 44 x 43 x 61 cm

CYRUS TANG is one of five artists whose work makes up the new exhibition at RMIT Gallery Insistent Gestures. This exhibition brings together artists who live, work or were born in Asia to explore personal narratives.

The repetitive movements – or insistent gestures – of making carry a sense of ritual and intimate recollection that resonates with the artists’ personal histories. Here an insistent, female and labour creating subjectivity is woven into being.

Tang's bronze series Topophilia is on show, with nos. 1 & 2 visible through specially installed peepholes, and no.3 mounted on the wall.

The exhibition continues until 9 November.

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JOHN YOUNG

John Young, The Lives of Celestials, 2019, installation view at Hawthorn Arts Centre

The Lives of Celestials, a solo show by JOHN YOUNG, is now open at Hawthorn Arts Centre.

Young invites us on a journey into the lives of significant figures of the Chinese diaspora in Australia, exploring important events in Chinese-Australian history from the 1840s onwards. Re-interpreted memories are distilled into large-scale installations of chalk drawings, photographs, video works and paintings.

A culmination of 3 recent History Projects by the artist, this exhibition reflects on the forces of survival, memory and otherness that continue to shape Australia's contemporary social context.

The exhibition will run until 20 October and is open 7 days a week!

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Review in Art Almanac >

GUO JIAN

GUO JIAN is the cover artist of the latest edition of Artist Profile magazine.

Artist Profile is presenting a new series of paintings by Guo Jian at Sydney Contemporary. These paintings engage with traditional Song dynasty landscapes to interrogate the relationship between China's 'rubbish culture', the disposability of celebrity and the destruction of minority cultures. Some of these new works are featured in this issue of the magazine alongside a fascinating story about the artist's career to date.

ARC ONE will also be showing some new paintings by Guo Jian in our booth at Sydney Contemporary!

The magazine is on sale now!

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, 'The Imperative', HD video, 1.48 min

CYRUS TANG is supporting Sleepless Summer, a solidarity project bringing together artists from Hong Kong and Australia which endeavours to rally support for democracy protests in HK.

Curated by Nikki Lam, Sleepless Summer will present a group exhibition alongside a public program of artist discussions, performances and solidarity actions like protest-banner-making.

A selection of independent publications on Hong Kong's civil rights struggles, collected by Zine Coop, will also be presented.

Tang is showing her video work, The Imperative.

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EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS

Eugenia Raskopoulos, (dis)order, 2019, 10.33 single-channel digital video installation, discarded household goods, dimensions variable. Installation view at The National exhibition, Carriageworks, 2019.

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS's work (dis)order is now on show at the Ningbo Museum in China in their 2019 Pacific Rim exhibition.

This work sees a tower built from discarded whitegoods stacked high and then toppled by the artist. Footage of the performance plays over the site of the destruction, where the appliances now lay scattered.

(dis)order is at once action and archive. It questions the speed at which we obtain and discard technologies of convenience, and implies that these machines are an inadequate or impermanent substitute to the body in domestic space.

The Ningbo Art Museum was built in 2005 and designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Wang Shu.

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ROBERT OWEN

Robert Owen, Endings (Kodachrome 64, No.00, 22/07/1992), 2009, archival print on 310gms Carsons BSK Reeves Paper, 104 x 72.5 cm

Serial has recently opened at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery. This exhibition explores the significance of the series in contemporary artistic practice, and features work from their permanent collection, including one of ROBERT OWEN's Endings prints.

Robert Nelson, art critic for The Age, writes of this series:

"Robert Owen’s Endings look like bright abstract landscapes. They are in fact prints made from film stubs that Robert collected from 1968 to the 90s, when film began to come to an end for the bulk of photography. But Robert kept them, because each one always marked an end. What would happen when you shine photographic light through the end rather than the middle?...The Endings are a portrait of a photograph beyond the last photograph; and strangely this seems to presage the end of photography while simply representing the end of the photosensitive celluloid.”

The exhibition continues until 10 November.

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NIKE SAVVAS

NIKE SAVVAS has created a large-scale, site-specific commission for the Toi Art Gallery at Te Papa Tongawera, Museum of New Zealand.

Made up of thousands of colourful tabs suspended mid-flight, Finale: Bouquet is a kinetic, colourful and optically dazzling art installation. As a student of painting in the 1980s, Savvas became increasingly dissatisfied with the assumed two-dimensionality of the medium and the prescribed limits of its materials. Her practice has since developed a central concern with the broader experiential zone of conceptual, spatial and sensorial immersion. "It's like a huge abstract expressionist painting", she says of Finale, "a painting in the making, with tens of thousands of brushstrokes." The colours Savvas has chosen are inspired by the watercolour artworks of native flora by the early 20th century New Zealand artist Sarah Featon.

The exhibition will continue until 12 January 2020.

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Review in Artist Profile magazine >

Images: Nike Savvas, Finale: Bouquet, 2019, recyclable plastic, electric fans, 7.8 x 18.9 x 8.7 m. Photos courtesy of Te Papa.

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT | JOHN YOUNG

Oceans from here is an exhibition of contemporary photography exploring the aesthetics of water and its ebb and flow as a global life force. Currently showing at Gosford Regional Gallery, it features the work of HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, and JOHN YOUNG.

Ten artists selected by the Australian Centre for Photography have responded to water as a vital element, which flows through the land to the seas and fills the atmosphere of our planet. Several of the artists reinforce notions of an Australian identity so closely tied to the oceans that surround this nation island. Others immerse the viewer in a metaphorical ocean that surrounds, defines and moves through us all.

The exhibition continues in Gosford until 1 September.

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Image credits:

Left: Honey Long & Prue Stent, Scallop, 2017, archival pigment print, 159 x 106 cm
Right: John Young, Ancient Water I, 2018, glicee print on archival Museo Silver Rag Paper, 126.5 x 73 cm.

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, The Modern World Encyclopaedia Vol.2, 2017, cremated book ashes, book cover, dimensions variable.

Congratulations to CYRUS TANG, a finalist in this year's Banyule Award for Works on Paper.

The 2019 Banyule Award called on artists to submit artworks that address current social, cultural, political or environmental issues. In Tang's selected work, the artist has taken a 1936 encyclopaedia and burned and arranged its contents. In this transformation of material, she suggests that the knowledge of the past has disappeared and we have not learnt from history.

The finalist exhibition will run from 28 August at Hatch Contemporary Arts Space in Ivanhoe.

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LYDIA WEGNER

Lydia Wegner, Orange Push, 2019, archival inkjet print, steel frame, 120 x 80 cm.

A big congratulations to LYDIA WEGNER, who is a finalist in this year's Bowness Photography Prize.

The Bowness Prize is an important survey of contemporary photographic practice and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country.

Wegner's work Orange Push will hang in the exhibition from 5 October - 17 November. This work was shown at ARC ONE earlier this year in Wegner’s solo show, Shifting Light.

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ROBERT OWEN

Image: Robert Owen, Sutra 4 (from the Tracing Light series), 2019, polished stainless steel, 651 x 451 x 421 cm. Photo: John Gollings.

Robert Owen has recently completed Sutra 4 - a privately commissioned large-scale work.

Sutra 4 is a sculpture based on the geometry of the hypercube, a mathematical concept referring to the fourth dimension. The work reconstructs Euclidian geometry through an intuitive play with space and light to reveal a new structural space with a relationship to the organic and the poetic.

ROBERT OWEN

Robert Owen, Melbourne Modern: European Art & Design at RMIT since 1945 installation view, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2019.

ROBERT OWEN spoke yesterday at A Bauhaus Impact at RMIT at RMIT Gallery, as part of the public programs for Melbourne Modern: European Art & Design at RMIT since 1945.

To mark the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany, curators Jane Eckett and Harriet Edquist, and artists Emily Floyd, and Robert Owen will be considering the extent to which Bauhaus principles impacted the teaching of art, architecture and design at RMIT.Robert Owen, 'Melbourne Modern: European Art & Design at RMIT since 1945' installation view, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2019.

JOHN YOUNG

John Young, Fairweather Transformation XI, 2019, Oil on Belgian linen, 76 x 72 cm.

ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present Silent Transformations, an important new body of work by leading Australian artist John Young.

Highly regarded in Australia and internationally for his commitment to intellectual rigor and aesthetic finesse, in Silent Transformations Young explores the sublime inherent in metamorphosis in a series of new paintings.

These meticulously painted abstract and representational canvases are meditations on the process of transformation. As Young describes, they point to “the moment when a caterpillar changes into a moth, when deformation and reformation exist side by side. Here, banal time continues unperturbed outside of the cocoon. We see the transformation of a caterpillar into a moth, but at that moment, what is inside the cocoon knows not what it is. There is a sublime, metaphysical and indescribable paradox between the one state and the other – and this change yields two different qualities of time. Within change, there is a melancholy. Once recognised, it’s impossible to see the world of forms in the same way again. In this silent transformation, form leads to a great formlessness and then back to form yet again. And so, the world goes, not kept static in ideal forms, but eternally and melancholically transforming.

The original bares little significance: we lose sight of it and forget, as it is hybridised into another, and yet another. In our mourning of forms gone, in our loss, our eyes try to adjust, to trace new edges, searching for a new significance of the world - as it is when sitting Shiva. This too will be our plight, as our own bodies hybridise and are augmented with the robotic and the algorithmic.”

-       John Young, 2019

John Young, Shiva II, 2019, Oil on Belgian linen, 71 x 89.5 cm.

The exhibition is presented in three thematic groups: The Fairweather Transformations take inspiration from Ian Fairweather, tracing the transfiguration of this nomadic artist’s work; Shiva mourns the forms lost within transformation; and finally, The Mute Palace shows that not all transcultural and hybridised forms will be permitted witness. Like the caterpillar changing into a moth, these paintings are evidence of silent transformation, of that which is unsayable, barely discernible; those gaps between civilisation that abound and enrich our world.

John Young Zerunge was born in Hong Kong and moved to Australia in 1967. Young read philosophy of science and aesthetics at the University of Sydney and then studied painting and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts. His investigation of Western late modernism prompted significant phases of work from a bi-cultural viewpoint, and he has devoted a large part of his three-decade career towards regional development in Asia, participating in significant touring exhibitions in the Asia-Pacific region including Art from Australia: Eight Contemporary Views, (1991, South East Asian Museums), Transcultural Painting (1994-5, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong), Systems End (1996, Japan and Korea), as well as representing Australia at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Antipodean Currents (1995, USA). Young has regular solo exhibitions in Australia and also shows in Berlin, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

From 31 August – 20 October this year, The Lives of Celestials, a comprehensive survey exhibition of three recent History Projects by Young will be exhibited at the Town Hall Gallery, Boroondara. In 2005-06, a survey exhibition covering 27 years of works was held at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, curated by Maudie Palmer. The Bridge and the Fruit Tree, a survey exhibition covering works from 2000-2012 was exhibited in February-March 2013 at Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, curated by Anthony Oates and Terence Maloon.

Three separate monographs have been written on John Young’s works and projects by Dr. Graham Coulter-Smith (1993, Schwartz City Publications); and Dr. Carolyn Barnes and William Wright AM (2005, Craftsman House, Thames & Hudson); and Dr Carolyn Barnes and Professor Jacqueline Lo (Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery). In 2017, Young released a new publication of The Macau Days with novelist Brian Castro, supported by the J.M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. John Young’s work features in prominent museum collections in Australia and internationally, and recently has been acquired in depth by M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

IMANTS TILLERS

On Tuesday 6 August at 6pm, The University of Melbourne will host the Melbourne premiere of Thrown Into the World, directed by Antra Cilinska.

This feature-length documentary offers unique insight into IMANTS TILLERS’ creative process and cross-cultural identity. The screening will be followed by a half hour discussion with Imants Tillers, chaired by Ian Mclean.

The film will screen at Federation Hall on the university’s Southbank campus. Places are filling up fast, so register your attendance today!

JACKY REDGATE

Jacky Redgate with her work, Buxton Contemporary, 2019.

JACKY REDGATE is featured in Bauhaus Now! at Buxton Contemporary.

Bauhaus experiments with photography have been reprised by Redgate, particularly those of Florence Henri, who used prisms and mirrors in order to exploit, as her Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy explained, 'the ambiguities of present-day optical creations'. Redgate's images are created through repetitive flashes across variously sized circular mirrors. These four new works in her decade-long series are like a secular alter to light, recalling the intensity of Henri's photography.

These works were included in Redgate's solo exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery earlier this year. .

Bauhaus Now! continues until 20 October.

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ROSE FARRELL & GEORGE PARKIN

Farrell & Parkin, Self Portrait #2 from the series Self Portraits, 2003, Type C Colour photograph, 73 x 76 cm.

ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present Rose & George, a survey of Rose Farrell & George Parkin’s provocative and visionary collaborative practice.

‘We see ourselves to be one artist with one mind, a total equilibrium.’

–      Rose Farrell & George Parkin, 2010. 

Rose Farrell (1949 – 2015) and George Parkin (1949 – 2012) are recognised nationally and internationally as one of Australia’s most significant and pioneering collaborative artistic partnerships. Their extraordinary vision and united mind pushed the boundaries of photographic portraiture and video art throughout the three decades of their practice.

This exhibition surveys Farrell & Parkin’s oeuvre through selected key works from major series produced between the mid-80s and 2011, including Repentance (1988), Black Room (1992-93), Pulleys, Dislocations and Counterweights (1997-98), A Thousand Golden Remedies (2000), Self Portraits (2003-06), Random Acts (2004), Chinese Self Portraits (2006-09), and their final collaboration, Curious Evolution (2008-11).

Farrell & Parkin, The Annunciation from the series Repentance, 1988, Type C Photograph, 166 x 128 cm.

Linking performance, photography, illustration and sculpture, Farrell & Parkin’s elaborately constructed photographic tableaux contemplate the history of the body and mind. Drawing on a myriad of cultural and historical references – from Renaissance and Baroque religious iconography, cinema traditions, myth, and the healing focus of archaic Eastern and Western medical practices and psychiatry – these works explore the mysteries and uncertainties of the human psyche and the fragility of our existence; articulating what Farrell & Parkin have described as, ‘the perilous journey that humans take throughout life’.

Rose Farrell (1949 – 2015) & George Parkin (1949 – 2012) worked collaboratively from 1984 – 2012, creating enigmatic performative photography and video art. Their importance to Australian art history became apparent early in their career with national representation, acquisitions, and exhibitions by major public art institutions in Australia and abroad, including Black Room at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1995, the Scottish International Festival of Photography, 1995, Curious Evolution at Deakin University Gallery, 2015, and Topography of a Collaborative Mind, a major retrospective at Glen Eira City Council Gallery in 2010. Their work was curated into international exhibitions in Canada, France, Russia, Germany, the United States, and Asia, including Photographica Australis, which opened at the National Gallery of Thailand, Bangkok in 2003 and toured through Asia, 2003-04, and Science Fiction at the Singapore Art Museum, 2003. Major group exhibitions include Infinite Conversations: Asian-Australian Exchange, National Gallery of Australia, 2018; Constructed Worlds, National Gallery of Australia, 2011; The Naked Face: Self Portrait, The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, 2010-2011; Role Play: Portrait Photography, NGV International, 2007-08; Heavenly Creatures, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2004-05; Second Sight: Australian Photography in the NGV, NGV Australia, 2003 and Wall to Wall, National Gallery of Australia, 1998. They held over 50 solo exhibitions and numerous group during their lifetime together.

Farrell & Parkin were the recipients of numerous awards and prizes including the 2005 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, and in 1992 and 1994 they were the recipients of the Gold Medallion at the International Photographic Salon of Japan in Tokyo. In 2006 they participated in the Red Gate Gallery International Residency Program in Beijing. They received a number of grants including an Arts Victoria, International Program – Export & Touring Grant in 2008 and an Australia China Council Grant in 2007.

Their work is held in major public collections nationally and internationally including Belgium, Canada, Portugal, Scotland, and the United States. Australian collections include the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Artbank.