Art Guide Australia

Art Guide Australia is a print and online magazine exploring contemporary Australian art. Our editors and our team of writers and contributors know the local art scene and keep you informed through engaging and thoughtful articles. We speak with artists, curators and gallerists to learn more about their ideas and share them with an audience who want to know more about Australian art and what to see. We’re here to support a vibrant and diverse arts community and our aim is to provide independent, considered editorial coverage alongside a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the visual arts across Australia.

Art Guide Australia

Issue 140 Contributors

A Note From the Editor

Previews

Ballarat

Sydney

Hobart

Melbourne

Adelaide

Sydney

Midland

Grafton and Sydney

Hobart

What the Clouds Tell Us • From his cosmological interests that earned an asteroid named after him, to his vibrant paintings of clouds and marine life, Torres Strait Islands artist Segar Passi is being honoured in a six-decade retrospective at Cairns Art Gallery.

Connecting Past and Present • The new Sydney Modern campus will transform the Art Gallery of New South Wales—making it the largest cultural investment in Sydney since the Opera House.

TextaQueen • The striking, idiosyncratic artwork of TextaQueen has a life of its own. Working primarily with markers, the Melbourne-based non-binary artist creates bold, often irreverent depictions of diasporic experience. Their new show, Bollywouldn’t, skewers Bollywood archetypes by way of fictional film posters, starring other queer and trans South Asian people, presented as digital projections onto images of famous buildings around the world.

Kate Rohde • Kate Rohde envisions flora and fauna in glossy technicolour. Her whimsical resin and plaster sculptures are simultaneously natural, unnatural, and even supernatural. In a space shared with her fluffy ginger cat Lion and her 6-year-old son, Rohde’s warehouse in Melbourne’s Northcote is a busy site of creativity and play. She talks about the luxuries—and pitfalls—of having a large studio space, how her versatile materials allow her to swiftly create works for tight deadlines, and the strange wonder of growing up in the Dandenong Ranges.

Politics of Portraiture • While portraiture is one of the most ubiquitous genres, it has an urgent social undercurrent that contemporary artists are questioning and expanding with stunning effect

20 Questions with Jemima Wyman • Palawa artist Jemima Wyman creates art on political formations of our time, from protests to resistance movements. Using techniques of collage, Wyman arranges images of resistance into beguiling formations. Ahead of Wyman’s inclusion in Air at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, we asked her 20 questions

Another Version • A renowned Australian painter, the many sides of Peter Booth have been unfolding since the 1960s in works of dark narrative. Now, a new survey traces what Booth tells us about humanity.

Nadia Hernández and Jon Campbell • I met with Nadia Hernandez and Jon Campbell at a Melbourne pub for a parma and a chat about their joint exhibition Speech Patterns at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). This is a thrilling meeting of two intergenerational artists who share an affinity for text, colour and line. Their works engage with identity, language, class, pop culture and diaspora in playful and generous paintings that excite the gaze. In a conversation premised on a shared love for humour and words, Hernandez and Campbell talk about exhibiting together and the importance of cross-generational friendships.

The Artist’s Prayer • When arts funding feels akin to faith, illustrator Oslo Davis recites ‘The Artist’s Prayer’.

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