
Giving titles to my artworks has always been fraught with indecision. I wonder about the point of the title – procrastinate on it’s purpose and it’s contribution. Most art being made these days is no longer illustrative of myth, bible story or allegory. Individual artists no longer generate renditions of a common narrative in their art. So why does a title
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In 1985 the Guerrilla Girls exploded onto the art scene in protest of the male-dominated exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where out of the 169 artists represented, only 13 were female. Since then they have worked tirelessly and humorously to redress this underrepresentation of women artists in major collections. This
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I’ve just seen the Wicked Women exhibition at the Justice and Police Museum at Circular Quay. This exhibition is based on the pulp fiction magazine covers of the 50and 60s. You know the kind – they feature trashy, brazen, sexually alluring women poised with gun or knife about to commit some dastardly crime. The ones where ‘bad girls’ had the upper hand over bad
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I’ve been thinking about how size and scale impact the emotional punch of the work. One of my favourite artists Ron Mueck uses this to his advantage with his super real silicone sculptures. Mueck, with a background in theatre design grew up as the son of a toy maker. As father and son sometimes will, they shared a passion for making things.
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Last weekend, along with half a million others I went to look at the Renaissance show in Canberra. For me this was a good thing, having an insatiable appetite for gold frames and anyone with a halo. However, for my companions, it was a bit of a trial. Apart from the slow-moving conga line crowd, the over-supply of Madonna and
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Recently, the Queensland University Art Museum awarded the $50,000 National Artists Self-portrait Prize 2011 to Domenico de Clario for a series of six paintings and six viewing chairs. This composite work evokes memories of each of the six decades in the artist’s life. Not a mark, nor a stroke on any of the six paintings indicates a body part, a
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This is my response to John McDonald’s article which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Oct 29-30, 2011. For the most part John’s blog is well-worth reading but I felt I had to respond to some of what John said in his article about the Portia Geach exhibition. The link to his article is here. Hi John, I read
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Not quiet public art?
Not far from where I live is a narrow strip of bushland sandwiched between two neighbouring suburbs. It’s criss-crossed with fire trails, punctuated with sandstone bluffs and the remnants of a once enthusiastic creek. In many ways it’s an archetypal piece of Australian bush and lately it’s become the site for some very interesting public art. Over the last couple of
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