Don’t miss Nicky Dickson’s (PhD, Painting) upcoming show at the ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery.

In her own words:

‘Other’ Visions

The term exotic carries with it connotations of foreignness, excitement and an attractive strangeness. The exotic is not an inherent quality found in particular people, objects or places rather it is a particular form of perception that originated in the European mind when confronted with the ‘other’ Pacific or Australasian person, plant, animal, or artefact. Identification of the strange or unusual exotic ‘other’ is made by comparison to things and people that are usual and familiar. It is the very strangeness and unfamiliarity of the ‘other’ that becomes attractive and desirable.
The cultural lure of the exotic was, and is, a strange, paradoxical blend of the empirical and the fantastic. Factual information was interpreted and inevitably perceived through European conventions and desires. This exhibition engages with how assumptions formed concerning the ‘other’ person or artefact from elsewhere were constructed and presented to 18th and 19th century European audiences as a fantastic jumble of ‘curiosities’. This predominately occurred in the context the natural history museum. In this period there was no distinction made between specimens of plants, animals, people or their material culture; all were considered revelatory of the characteristics of the exotic ‘other’ and the diversity found in nature.

Nicola Dickson 2008

is the title of Pam Lofts’ Alice Prize entry. To be announced tonight…

…recent MPhil graduate of the ANU School of Art Pam Lofts is showing with Helen Maxwell Gallery at Silvershot, in Melbourne.

Visit Megan’s blog and see what ANU School of Art postgraduate alumna Natali Rodrigues has been up to… (Saves me all that assembly!)

by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax’s new exhibition at CCAS Manuka. Her drawing of a flock of starlings creates compelling illusions, as well as gritty surface qualities, as it swirls around you. It’s an irregular space which lends itself to surprising effects.

Sarina (a PhD candidate in Printmedia) explains: Time can be experienced in different ways. It can be quantified by the sweep of hands around a clock face, or experienced through the ongoing cycles of Nature. These seasonal changes are easily observed in recurring events such as the waxing and waning of the moon, but can also be noticed in ordinary moments such as the flight of birds across the sky.

This exhibition of charcoal drawings contains the traces of such a chance encounter. Transposed onto the gallery walls, the flight of a starling flock takes place within a unit of imagined time. The ghostly silhouettes contain the memory of their flight, and recall Rilke’s poetic concept that ‘silently the birds fly through us.’ This form of experiential time is not quantifiable, as it cannot be measured as a length of distance over time, for the starlings are simultaneously both here and there.

Her show (titled here + there) is open from this Wed (30th) til Sunday (4th May) from 11 – 5pm

Lia was an MPhil graduate (in Ceramics, obviously) in 2006. This piece (from the ‘Nudibranch series’, mid-fire porcelain, 2006, photo by ANU photography) is characteristic of the work she did in the program, and is currently in the border, an exhibition at CraftACT. Lia gives the following account of her motivation in works such as this:

Aesthetically, the visual inspirations for the work are natural forms including plants, coral and sea creatures. This work does not set out to replicate the specifics of particular organic forms but seeks to capitalize on the strange, complex, richly patterned and brightly coloured beauty of the natural world. That said, there are elements of the work that are often confused with actual organic things, and in this way act as a kind of mimesis or an imitation of nature. This creates confusion between representations and the real.

The nudibranch or sea slug is a delightfully strange and weird looking thing. I am drawn to its flamboyance and extravagance – why is a sea slug so ornate? It seems like a fine thing to try to combine with an object that alludes to function in that it acts as a setting off point between the understandable reality of a functional object (vase) and something beyond easy understanding –the animate and inanimate together.

Don’t we love seeing what people do along the way? Here’s Hanna Hoyne (PhD, Sculpture) building a what? If you’re patient, we’ll show you how it turns out.

calls his show at ANCA Gallery Dickson “I wish I was David Bowie”. The title’s allusive. The show is more about getting under your skin. Catch it before it closes on April 13.

It seems only yesterday that our Norwegian Glass alumna Lene Lunde was just down the corridor. Since then, back in Norway, she’s been working like crazy for a show that translates as “Glass and Plastic and Stuff: something for the very smallest of us”.

She’s been blowing in the glass studio at the Ebeltof Glass Museum, and the cold work and engraving is done on the farm “accompanied by one dog, seven cats, and twenty chickens”. All very nervous, no doubt, as they watch what happens to all these other animals!

If you’ve been reading the weekend papers, you will have seen both John MacDonald and Sebastian Smee competing to qualify their appreciation of the NGA current exhibition Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape. Now to enjoy a really fine exhibition review by Holland Cottier (in the NYT 14 March 2008) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to read Chinese Paintings click here, and then click the RELATED article button to The Art is in the Detail. Thanks to Max for alerting us.