Monthly Guest Curators
The following leading Curators and Gallery Directors from around Australia each selected an artist to be featured on this site and wrote a piece to accompany the selected works. Each Curator came to the Northern Rivers and participated in VAN Curatorial Panels for artists. In these meetings, artists received critical feedback about their work, and career advice and suggestions.
read more about curatorial panels »
Djon Mundine O.A.M., Campbelltown Arts CentreFeatured artist: Karla Dickens
<p>Extract from Essay "Conversations with a Crow": Karla Dickens [b.1967], Wiradjuri people</p> <p>'My people will disappear for a time but when they return artists will lead them.' Louis Riel [Méetis leader, 1844-1885, att.]</p> <p>Karla is Wiradjuri, her parents are from Mascot, Sydney. Karla Dickens was born in Sydney in 1967; the Year of the Referendum, that gave Aboriginal people human status within the nation called Australia. A double dawn for Aboriginal people; a major national political and social shift, and an innocent new born seemingly as yet without any connection to her history and Aboriginal heritage.</p> <p>As she tells, the process of moving from childhood to the present was a colourful and, at times, destructive journey of self discovery. Ironically and literally a truly dark but noble 'Dickensian' life. In the 1970s feminists spoke of being three times discriminated against - being Aboriginal, being a woman, and being gay.</p> <p>Karla’s Aboriginality and sexuality do profoundly inform her work - yet her insight and breadth of artistic practice both embraces the notion of identity politics deeply and yet works with universal human experiences. Her work truly fosters an intra and cross cultural dialogue through the forum of contemporary art.</p> <p>Pictured: Djon Mundine, Campbelltown Arts Centre Indigenous Curator - Contemporary Art, 2007, photo Ian Hobbs.</p> <p><a href="Djon%20Mundine%20Essay.doc">Read the full essay here</a></p> |
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Louise Martin-Chew, Critic & Senior Arts WriterFeatured artist: Paula Bannan
In these paintings from 2005, Paula Bannan’s twenty year career as an artist and traveller yields diverse inspiration – drawn from the Iraqi war, time spent working with indigenous artists in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, research on war propaganda, and her early training as a printmaker. These influences coalesce into particular images of experience and observation, and tie wit to overarching pattern and shape. They combine strong colour and tight composition, and an appreciation of the machinery they portray – flattened patterns from land or city, infilled by planes, tanks, caravans, cars, and the recurring star symbol. With surfaces as densely textured as their multitudinous sources, these paintings build a lively aesthetic around concepts both personal and political. (Louise Martin-Chew, 11 March 2008) Photo by Patrick McKenna. |
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Philip Bacon, Philip Bacon GalleriesFeatured artist: Jenny Kitchener
"The work of Jenny Kitchener is complex and detailed in both its technical realization and inherent themes. The work ‘Totem’ consists of 16 panels printed by linocut onto woven material. The small-scale prints are intricate and painstaking, demonstrating a considerable skill and technical precision. The themes that the artist confronts are equally complex. A narrative cycle is built from symbols that are repeated with no identifiable beginning or end. ‘Totem’ successfully evokes a sense of place and indicates an appreciation of the rich, natural environment in which Kitchener creates her work." Philip Bacon AM, August 2007 |
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Dr Gene Sherman, Sherman Contemporary Art FoundationFeatured artist: Cal MacKinnon
"The visit to the Northern Rivers was a chance to talk with artists who enjoy stretching boundaries. I was delighted to have the opportunity of sharing something of my twenty years experience in the contemporary art world with local and regional artists. I have selected the work of Cal Mackinnon to be featured on the VAN website. Her work deals with memory and history – grounded in local experience – in a compelling and unusual suite of related images." Dr Gene Sherman |
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Tim Olsen, Tim Olsen GalleryFeatured artist: Emma Walker
"Emma Walkers abstracted landscapes are loosely based on coastal environments; oceans, waterways, headlands, clouds and shadows. Yet her work aims to capture the human experience of place, the atmosphere and sensation of place, rather than detailing any specific view. Emma uses layers of paint, abstract forms and a limited palette to explore the connections between landscape, memory and the subconscious. There is a certain drama in her work, an extreme play of light and dark in the landscape which adds a dreamlike dimension to her paintings." Tim Olsen 2006 |
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David Broker, Canberra Contemporary Art SpaceFeatured artist: Daniel Brinsmead
It was the wild, ostensibly undisciplined quality of Daniel Brinsmead’s paintings that initially attracted me. The popular imagery in Daniel’s work seems to have been run through a wringer only to be spat out the other side in the form of a visual language that is quite unique to the artist. When he says that he is exploring the paradox of personal politics he is†attempting to understand and interpret his world-view through painting. Digging deep, there is a profoundly dark side to these paintings that reflects a world in which the individual has a tenuous grip on the controls. While Daniel never openly reveals specific situations or events, one always feels that he is painfully honest and that this cathartic work might drive us along the dangerous path to understanding the Cimmerian recesses of the human psyche. David Broker Director Canberra Contemporary Art Space |
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Russell Storer, MCAFeatured artist: Lyndall Adams
Lyndall Adams's works are evocative and visually striking. Through a collage of images, objects and texts drawn from a range of sources, both public and personal, her works tap into a form of collective memory. She creates fascinating suggestions of ordinary lives deeply grounded in her local experience, stating that 'hidden in the ellipses / somewhere between memory, archive and history great stories hide'. |
