Tag Archives: Visual Arts

Art in the Street

Review: Art in the front yard

Canberra 16-17 November 2013

Take a quiet little street in Downer. Local artist Stephen Harrison is a resident. Stephen asks the neighbours if he can take over the street and their front yards for the weekend. They say yes. Stephen then brings in the work of  about three dozen artists. And so a fun weekend arrived……

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Photography and The Tableau

Review: Anna Carey – Contemporary Photography

For travelers of urban space and cities, there is nothing more enjoyable as roaming streets and observing both the unusual and the ordinary. In reality most of time the ordinary and the unusual do tend to blend. Anyone who is an observer of street behaviour realises that there is not much that is ordinary about how people behave as they wander, rush or simply promenade about our urban thoroughfares. The streets of our cities are packed with these constantly changing tableaux. The realities are fun to observe as well as those things we conjure up in our imaginations about the buildings and the streets and the parks and the cosmopolitan mix of people.

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NGA: Turner from the TATE

Review: Exhibition at the NGA 2013

Turner From The Tate
exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, June – September 2013.

Having visited this exhibition three times while it was in Canberra , once in Adelaide and having five times visited Turner in the Tate in London, I have been contemplating these experiences and offer the following comments as a review.

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The Art Gallery

It’s About Seating

The visitor experience – seating

on-the-phoneP1010760

The entry spaces and seating within our major public galleries are not the most user-friendly. For reasons I cannot understand, most of our public art institutions have not made their foyers friendly spaces so that it could be easy to meet up and to have that initial chat before moving off to see what there is to enjoy.

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William Eggleston

Review: Book (and exhibition)

William Eggleston, Paris, 2009

I like William Eggleston’s photographs. Big Time!

I purchased this book having seen London exhibition by William Eggleston in January 2010. The exhibition had more recent work than was in the book. It was great.

The book I purchased later and have just been looking through it again. I also took out a copy of the 1976 William Eggleston’s Guide. I was fascinating to read the essay by John Szarkowski after all these years. He mentioned Kodachromes; wonder how many remember what they were? The essay still makes for a good read.

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Richard Avedon

Exhibition Review

Richard Avedon at National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
August – November  2013

Claude and Paloma Picasso.Christopher Chapman of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is to be congratulated for curating this exhibition of a diverse range of Richard Avedon’s work.

For people not too familiar with his work, it is a great introduction to the scope of photography produced by this famous artist.

 

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Public Art Altered

Art in Public Places

Comment on altering a piece of public art

ANU Public Art: Dadang Christanto.  Witness, 2004

The ANU has wonderful array of public art throughout their very nice campus.

One of my favourite pieces has been surrounded by fence.

I visited the site today and walked around and pondered:

Why the fence? Its presence just did not make sense.

Here’s a link to more on this topic, and more photos

Let me know if you can throw any light on this mystery.

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Paul Costigan, October 2013

Splendid

Exhibition Review

Adrienne Doig at Martin Browne Contemporary
September – October 2013

Adrienne Doig at Martin Browne Contemporary

I was introduced to Adrienne’s current work when visiting the 2013 contemporary art fair in Sydney in September.

I was intrigued. Her use of eBay purchased embroided patchwork struck a chord and I was hoping to see more soon.

The next day we were wandering over to see another exhibition when we realised  we were near to Martin Browne Contemporary and took the chance to see if her work was on exhibition. It was and I was again very interested. Continue reading Splendid

Spirit Landscapes

Exhibition Review
Spirit Landscapes, Tracey Moffatt

Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney, September 2013

I like a lot of Tracey Moffatt’s work and have seen quite a lot of it over the years. Some of her more recent works have been mixed and my jury is still out on whether they are great works. In most cases they no longer are photographs as they are mixed media usually based on some photographic manipulations. Continue reading Spirit Landscapes

National Portrait Gallery

Review: Urbanity

A work in progress – reviewing the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra

The National Portrait Gallery of Australia opened in 2009 to much acclaim. This national cultural institution has become a very popular tourist destination. The gallery sits in amongst trees in the National Parliamentary Triangle alongside the National Gallery of Australia and the High Court of Australia.

While I have seen nothing but praise for the building, I beg to differ.  Particularly when talking about the outside of the building and how it ‘sits in the landscape’. More on that later.

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CITY of Trees

Review: Visual Arts

City of Trees, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 5 July – 7 October 2013

This review originally published  August 2013

One lazy Saturday afternoon I took myself over to the National Library of Australia. I had read all the advertising and was very much looking forward to an exhibition on the trees of Canberra.

Any exhibition that focused on the trees of Canberra has to be something to see, something to talk about, and something that would be most embraced.

P1010530the entrance with two light boxes   

In short, this one did none of those things for this reviewer. This exhibition in this prestigious national library exhibition space just left me wondering just what happened. Did the exhibition curators sign up a feel good Centenary Exhibition about one of the core features of the national capital; its fabulous trees. And then the pieces arrived and there was nothing to do but to make a good show of it. In this case it has been well laid out with all the usual fine aesthetics of good curatorship. But the content is just not there.

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