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
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.
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.
the 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.