The Folly is a three-screen digital work in which Arlo Mountford has animated three paintings by the sixteenth century Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Using the computer, Mountford redrew the genre paintings The Corn Harvest (1565), The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c1558).
For Brian Blanchflower, painting is an ongoing enterprise – a statement about where one is, in an internal sense – a merging of inner experience with reactions to outer phenomena.
A Sydney-based collaborative of four artists Brown Council appropriate theatrical traditions such as vaudeville, skits, stand-up-comedy and pantomime in their practice, while making reference to the history of performance and video art. Their work draws on the concept of spectacle and physical endurance to investigate what it is to perform, and how live performances are documented.
Charlie Sofo collects, observes and displays everyday forms and materials and re-presents them as items of wonder. The obsessive nature of his practice is revealed by his accumulation of various different materials, from lint to human hair. These items are transformed by the artist’s own subtle intervention with medium and appearance.
The reworking of significant historical works is a potent artistic tool for commentary on Australia’s history, past and present. Aboriginal artist Daniel Boyd examines colonial narratives in Australian art, from heroic depictions of Captain Cook to encounters between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers.
David Stephenson has been taking making photographs of the natural world and man-made environments for over thirty years, firstly in the USA and then in Australia.
David Stephenson has been taking photographs of the natural world and man-made environments for over thirty years: the night sky, arctic landscape, riverbeds, ecclesiastical ceilings, and global cityscapes. His works are marked by a sense of self-deliberation; they evoke notions of the sublime and man’s capacity to pass time.
Partly fictitious and partly autobiographical, Destiny Deacon’s world is populated by a cast of dolls, family and friends who enact ‘soap opera’ vignettes (1). She dramatises human comedies and tragedies within invented and fabricated dioramas, her entourage accompanied by masks, props and costumes revealing human foibles. Characters seem to be acting up and acting out.
Destiny Deacon’s work deals with both historical issues and contemporary Aboriginal life. It is informed by personal experience and readily accessible mass media. Her photographs feature members of the artist’s family and friends posing for the camera as well as items from her collection of ‘Aboriginalia’ (assorted black dolls and kitsch).
This seemingly simple video work by Dorota Mytych is compelling not only in its use of media but also in the way the subject matter is handled. A trace of the process of drawing is discernable in the way in which Mytych has shaped her initial composition with the most everyday of materials, dry tea leaves on a white ground.
Elaine Campaner photographs scenes she constructs from everyday, domestic objects – knick-knacks, painted plates, dolls and other toys.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work is distinguished by its vitality, boldness and innovation. She was from the remote community of Utopia, north east of Alice Springs, and like other celebrated Aboriginal artists, she began painting late in life. Not only was her output prodigious, she developed five consecutive styles in the eight years before her death.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. Along with a number of other senior Aboriginal artists, her career began late in life. During an eight-year period from 1989 until 1996, she produced over 3000 paintings.
Emma White's sculpted objects presented in combination with a photograph of itself draws out the differences between an object and its reproduction, a model and a copy.
Constructed from mixed media and adorned with shells, these tiny slippers exemplify traditional Indigenous craft practices of La Perouse, a headland on the shores of Botany Bay with a large Aboriginal population.
Dressing up, acting out, striking a pose, and reframing the past are all means by which Fiona Foley has addressed the viewer in her photographic series since the early 1990s.
The work Bliss, by Brisbane-based Indigenous artist Fiona Foley, is a work concerned with the hidden history of settler and Indigenous relations in Queensland, and in particular, the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.
Fiona Hall studied painting and came to prominence as a photographer, but has extended into media including sculpture, installation, moving image and garden design.
Gemma Smith’s sculptural works The Adaptables are based on the geometric paintings she was making at the time, breaking them down across a three-dimensional surface. As constructed forms, each piece can be manipulated by hand to reveal different permutations.
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Museum of Contemporary Art, donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Ann Lewis AO, 2009.
Gordon Bennett’s work Untitled (dismay, displace, disperse, dispirit, display, dismiss) (1989) uses word and image to explore notions of language as a tool with which the colonisers of Australia subjugated the country’s original inhabitants.
Grant Stevens works across various media including sculpture, drawing and photography but he is best known for his video work.
Hany Armanious is a sculptor who explores ideas of doubling and artifice through the transformation of objects. Utilising the process of casting, he creates simulacra of insigificant everyday objects, investing them with enigmatic value. Fastidious explorations of form, they are often decorative as well as humorous.
For Hayden Fowler, one motivation for his interdisciplinary practice is a critique of contemporary Western society. Fowler investigates our interactions with the natural world and how we define ourselves with regard to nature. He is interested in the nexus between civilisation and the domestication of animals, focusing on aspects such as interdependency and adaptation.
Artist Hayden Fowler explores humanity’s relationship with the natural world and the broader historical and cultural concepts that influence this engagement.
Hiromi Tango is a Japanese-born artist, currently based in Sydney, who creates immersive, sculptural installations that invite audience interaction, often with a performative aspect. Hiromi Tango is interested in the therapeutic ability of art and ‘interactions that create moments of magic that might otherwise be lost in the perpetual motion of daily life’.
Hossein Valamanesh emigrated from Iran to Australia in 1973. He graduated from the School of Fine Art and Painting in Tehran in 1970 and once in Australia began further studies, graduating in 1977 from the South Australian School of Art.
Ian Burn was an Australian artist known internationally for his leading role in the development of conceptual art. His Systematically Altered Photographs play with the idea of representation and reproduction.
Ildiko Kovacs’ abstract paintings reveal the influence of contemporary Indigenous art as well as Western traditions of art making. Her paintings rely on gesture and speak of painting as a physical act that relates to bodily movement. The processes of layering, accumulating and removing paint over time are also central aspects of Kovacs’ practice.
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