Toni Ross

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  print November 2022

  Ronnie van Hout

  A trademark of Ronnie van Hout’s art is his way of casting himself in multiple roles, whether in low-budget videos or as the face attached to sculptural figures ranging from pajama-clad adolescent boys to a giant anthropomorphic hand named Quasi, 2016—short for Quasimodo. When installed on the roof of City Gallery Wellington in 2019, Quasi provoked the BBC headline ‘NIGHTMARE’ HAND STATUE LOOMS OVER NEW ZEALAND CITY. Van Hout’s scenarios regularly incorporate his own image into representations of social outcasts from film and literature.

  The centerpiece of van Hout’s latest Sydney show, “Unwelcome

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  print April 2022

  Kyra Mancktelow

  Last year, Kyra Mancktelow won the prestigious Emerging Artist Award at the annual Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA). Still in her mid-twenties, the artist has developed ingenious ways of addressing traumas of colonial history and asserting her Indigenous heritage. Attracting particular attention are monumental ink prints on paper of life-size garments Mancktelow fashions from tarlatan fabric, a thin open-weave cotton stiffened with starch. The clothing is copied from historical records to create printed impressions that cipher the coercion of First

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  print January 2022

  Yona Lee

  Since 2016, South Korean–born, Auckland-based artist Yona Lee has become known for her installations with titles that include the phrase “In Transit.” They are constructed of polished stainless-steel tubing—cut and welded to form running lines, bends, and knots—that is screwed to walls, floors, and ceilings. The quotidian references of these mazelike environments range from public-transport transit maps and industrial plumbing to those ubiquitous handrails, bollards, and barriers that everywhere assist or impede our movement in public spaces. Just as ardently ordinary are the everyday consumer

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  print May 2021

  Archie Moore

  The work of Archie Moore addresses the histories and politics of race. These themes are personal for the Brisbane-based artist, who was born in 1970—the son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father—and brought up in a small Queensland town where racism was a fact of life. The artist’s recent show, “The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W. E. B Du Bois” was made in response to curator José Da Silva’s invitation to make a work in dialogue with the handmade data visualizations produced in the late 1890s under the guidance of African American writer, activist, and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. These

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  print January/February 2021

  Natalya Hughes

  The title of Natalya Hughes’s latest exhibition, “The Landscape Is in the Woman,” borrowed Willem de Kooning’s words from 1953, the year when his first “Woman” paintings were exhibited. The recall of de Kooning’s fearsomely sexualized female bodies hacked out in Abstract Expressionist style might suggest yet another feminist critique of his portrayal of women as objectifying and aggressively misogynistic—a reproach that since the 1970s has become orthodoxy. While Hughes’s show was patently informed by such views, she describes her artistic conversation with this canonical modern painter in more

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  print May/June 2020

  Gemma Smith

  In a recent interview, Sydney-based artist Gemma Smith was quizzed regarding the “trappings” of high modernist abstraction salient in her work. Hinting that the repertoire of twentieth-century abstraction may seem anachronistic these days, the interviewer asked, “Do you ever wonder if you were born in the wrong era?” Smith’s unequivocal response: “No, of course not . . . There are still so many possibilities, even for abstraction.” Over a twenty-year career the artist has backed up this claim, finding ample scope for variation within a compendium of nonrepresentational idioms ranging across

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  print January 2020

  Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

  In a relatively short time, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s faux-primitive, mostly ceramic sculptures incorporating painting, graffiti, and other media have made a big splash on the Australian art scene. His recent exhibition included seven mixed-media ceramic sculptures arranged on eye-catching, neon-yellow flooring and a single bronze set on a translucent pedestal on the gallery’s original floor. The pieces recapitulated the interbred cultural references of the artist’s previous work, which range from multisexed Hindu gods to internet porn, emoji faces, and the naive expressivity of art brut.

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  print October 2019

  “The Housing Question”

  Housing justice is currently a hot topic in Australia and other developed economies, where great national wealth exists alongside growing homelessness, unaffordable rents, diminishing availability of social housing, and domestic property prices that far outstrip average incomes. The three-person show “The Housing Question,” curated by Julie Ewington, included a major collaborative work by the veteran Australian artists Sherre DeLys, Helen Grace, and Narelle Jubelin, along with individual works by each artist, all addressing the theme of housing from personal, historical, and social-justice

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  print May 2019

  “Just Not Australian”

  Co-organized by Artspace and Sydney Festival, “Just Not Australian” featured works by nineteen Australian artists and collectives of varied heritages. All were concerned with what it means to be cast as “un-Australian,” a politicized slander applied to any group, person, or act said to deviate from supposed norms of national identity. Over the years, opportunistic politicians and media commentators have mobilized the phrase to demonize targets varying from asylum seekers and striking workers to cricket cheats and the veils worn by Muslim women. For many of the artists in the show, contemporary

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  previews January 2019

  THE NATIONAL 2019: “NEW AUSTRALIAN ART”

  Curated by Clothilde Bullen, Anna Davis, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, and Isobel Parker Philip

  In 2017, three of Sydney’s major art institutions collaborated to stage the first of three biennial editions of The National, thus beginning to repair an absence in the city of large-scale surveys of Australian contemporary art. The 2019 iteration will showcase new and commissioned works by emerging and established Australian artists based in homeland cities, nonurban regions, and remote Indigenous communities, but also abroad. Sixty-five artists’ works are to be presented in three distinct exhibitions

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  print November 2018

  Yvonne Todd

  Yvonne Todd hit the New Zealand art scene in the early 2000s, and from the start she has been celebrated for bringing a touch of perversity to the traditional photographic genres of portraiture, still life, and landscape. Using a large-format camera, she deploys the slick artifice of studio portraiture and product photography to create images at once glamorous and sinister, generic and oddball.

  Todd’s recent exhibition, “‘Choux’: Still Lifes, 2006–2018,” presented eight still lifes. Such works have not garnered quite as much attention as the artist’s glamour portraits of young women. The latter

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  print October 2018

  Anne Zahalka

  Anne Zahalka broke onto the Australian art scene as one of a number of talented women artists who rode the wave of postmodernism in the 1980s. Her early work combining photography and appropriation is typically viewed as debunking stereotypes of place, identity, and culture, and as showing photographic verisimilitude to be a theatrical construct. One of Zahalka’s best-known early works refigures the Australian modernist Max Dupain’s famous black-and-white photograph Sunbaker, 1937, which highlights the impressive musculature and oiled skin of a male surfer soaking up rays on Sydney’s Bondi Beach.