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 • January/February 2023

Issue 141 Contributors

A Note From the Editor

Previews

Adelaide

Melbourne

Sydney

Perth

Geelong

Mackay

Sydney

Melbourne

Bunbury

Pink Is the New Pink • Why are we so hard on pink? Thinking Through Pink revels in a lush, complicated colour.

It Must Be Love • In stunning scenes of joy and connection, Dylan Mooney’s art depicts the love between queer Indigenous people.

Thea Anamara Perkins

Julia Gutman • Julia Gutman works with textiles donated by family and friends, creating layered figurative tableaux referencing personal and shared histories, which often recall imagery from canonical paintings. In mid-2022 she presented her first solo exhibition, Muses, at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney, prior to which she was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize and was awarded the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship. Ahead of her inclusion in Primavera 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art—a show featuring artists under age 35—we stepped inside Gutman’s studio in Lewisham in Sydney’s inner west, learning how connection is central to her practice.

Testing Grounds • Artist-run and experimental spaces are central to the story of Australian art, giving emerging and barrier-pushing works a place to be exhibited. While scores of such spaces exist throughout Australian art history, we asked five artists to tell us about their early works in experimental spaces and how these formative experiences became pivotal to their practices. At a time when the resourcing of such spaces is in constant jeopardy, these artists show the necessity of non-institutional exhibiting.

Exploring a Collective Unease • Andy Butler, Lisa Hilli and James Nguyen each engage with institutional collections and the power dynamics that shape public culture. Their works are informed by personal histories of migration from Southeast Asia (Butler and Nguyen) and the Pacific (Hilli), and they have a mutual crossover of experience—being one generation away from the village, they now navigate spaces founded on exclusion and prestige, like universities and museums.

When Money Costs Too Much • Many artists have boycotted arts events and organisations over unethical funding and partnership concerns. But should this burden always be placed on artists alone, particularly when the ability to boycott is its own privilege?

20 Questions With Jasmine Togo-Brisby • Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander artist. Her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu as children during the Pacific slave trade and made to work in Australia. Togo-Brisby explores this dark history, and its present-day ramifications, through photography, filmmaking and sculpture. Ahead of her inclusion in Other Horizons at Fremantle Arts Centre, we asked Togo-Brisby 20 questions.

Web of Life • From working with spider diviners to creating solar-powered hot air balloons, Tomás Saraceno’s exquisite art shows what we can learn from nature to rethink everything from climate change to wealth inequality.

From Memory • Gail Mabo’s latest, poignant exhibition tells the story of her...