ARTISTIC COLLABORATIONS

Del Kathryn Barton

As the second artist invited to engage with the cover as their canvas, Del Kathryn Barton includes not only the arresting and challenging painting or to make myself a space to inhabit, 2007, but reworks the ARTAND Australia logo in keeping with her aesthetic. Following the cover work are or to make myself a space to inhabit too and I am true about this, both 2007, which grace the inside cover pages transforming the beginning of Issue 45.3, Autumn 2008, into a gallery. In celebration of the Cover Commission, Del Kathryn Barton’s practice is discussed in a monographic essay by Anthony Gardner.

Del Kathryn Barton, or to make myself a space to inhabit, 2007, detail; acrylic gouache, watercolour and pen on polyester canvas, 219 x 180 cm; ARTAND Australia Collection; courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE +Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

To coincide with the 16th Biennale of Sydney, Revolution, Forms That Turn; (2008), ARTAND Australia gave over a substantial number of its pages to the Artistic Directors manifesto. In the features section of the Winter 2008 issue, guest edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, are monographic essays on exhibiting artists William Kentridge, Michael Rakowitz, Stuart Ringholt and Vernon Ah Kee. With this collaboration, ARTAND Australia became an active biennale site, participating in the central proposition that art can be an agent of change.
By collaboratively working with William Kentridge, Michael Rakowitz, Stuart Ringholt and Vernon Ah Kee, the magazine transitions into an active biennale site: participating in the central proposition that art can be an agent of change;. William Kentridge designs the cover, jolting his global perception of the impact of histories. This issue hopes to provoke a revolution of seeing through horror, form, function, medium and message.

Brook Andrew

For this issue (Winter 2010), which celebrated the life and achievements of eminent Australia curator and ARTAND Australia regular contributor and editorial adviser, Nick Waterlow, artist Brook Andrew was specially commissioned to create the collage Witnesses to history, 2010. In situating his work as a tribute to Waterlow, Andrew said: ‘Nick was a great believer in witnessing history and activating change. His was an eye-wide-open approach.’ In a monographic essay, Anthony Gardner further contextualises Andrew’s artistic practice. Brook Andrew, Witnesses to history, 2010, detail Magazine, newspaper, ink, 40 x 70 cm ARTAND Australia Collection Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

JOHN BALDESSARI

For the Summer 2010 issue, ARTAND Australia collaborated with Kaldor Public Art Projects to create a cover with John Baldessari, coinciding with his ambitious artwork, Your name in lights, 2011, which graced the faccedilade of the Australian Museum for the 2011 Sydney Festival. Creating Hand grasping a spider, 2010, for the cover, Baldessari reinterpreted the ARTAND Australia logo through his handwriting. John Baldessari, Hand grasping a spider, 2010 digital file, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist

Louise Weaver

This issue (Vol 44 Number 3 Autumn 2007) begins with a journey through the bestiary of Jorge Luis Borges ‘Book of Imaginary Beings’, passing mythological animals through to the creatures of our cultural imagining. From here, Louise Weaver’s exquisite and exotic creatures suggest themselves, creating Guido, the crocheted pacific gull, for the magazine’s front cover. This inaugurates a new series of Art & Australia Artist Editions. The central essay in this issue sees Jason Smith draw together a range of diverse and intriguing historical and contemporary influences in Louise Weaver’s work. This art classifies a ‘post-natural’ attitude, in which nature and culture become intertwined. We take the mythological animals of Borges and contemporises them, applying his bestiary folklore into an explanation of the transforming landscape of contemporary art; merging mythology and reality into a singular, powerful entity.

PATRICIA PICCININI

When trying to capture how we might understand spirituality in contemporary secular times, Australian religious studies scholar David Tacey draws on romantic poet John Keats and his notion of ‘negative capability’, namely, the capacity to be ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason’. When arguing the case for the need to ‘reconfigure the spiritual’ in contemporary art, American philosopher Mark C. Taylor suggests that four influential artists who have shaped the current discourse – Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney, James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy – all ‘have an abiding faith in the capacity of an “apocalypse of the imagination” to transform first the self and then the world’. And when attempting to articulate a new way of experiencing the relationship between humans and their environment, American political theorist Jane Bennett contends that not only are objects alive because of their capacities to shape the interrelationships of which they are a part, but humans are not autonomous; rather, they comprise a complex web of active bodies and materials. If we rethink the human/object dichotomy in this way, it leads us to accept that ‘any action is always a trans-action, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny’.

These attempts to reimagine relations between spirit, nature and human – that are to some extent driven by the prospect of impending ecological disaster – provide a fertile context to consider the most recent work of Patricia Piccinini.

This text appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in the ARTAND Australia Archive.

1. Metaflora (the female radical), 2014; digital drawing for ARTAND Australia, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

ROSEMARY LAING

For an issue that celebrated Australian artists overseas and the 2007 Venice Biennale, cover artist Rosemary Laing’s four-colour offset lithograph pictures a woman suspended in an expanse of land and sky. The edition accompanies an essay by Rex Butler on Laing’s artistic practice in Issue 44.4, Winter 2007 Rosemary Laing Weather #16, 2007, edition size: 30, four-colour offset lithograph, 63 x 90 cm

Ricky Swallow - Venice - John Kaldor

In Vol. 42 No. 4, 2005 of Art & Australia, John Kaldor selects six contemporary Australian artists to feature in our essay section. Curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Klaus Biesenbach, considers what it means for artists, such as Ricky Swallow, to internationally represent Australia on a global stage. We look at artists as a product of an increasingly contemporary international art world. Juliana Engberg approaches James Angus and Callum Morton on their sculptural works. Russell Storer writes on Daniel Crooks, TV Moore and Daniel von Sturmer about video in the expanded field. John Kaldor presents the first of his sections and George Alexander turns his attention to various art-world issues in his new column for Art & Australia. Featured artists and writers include: Klaus Biesenback, Sarah Thomas, Wally Caruana, George Alexander and Ronald Millen.

Susan Norrie + Juliana Engberg

Susan Norrie has created a special cover for this focus issue of Art & Australia, Vol. 41/4, based on her 2004 Biennale of Sydney work ENOLA. The cover features video stills of Tobu World Square, a miniature world in Japan, perfectly encapsulating the biennale’s global reach. Juliana Engberg writes on Susan Norrie, an artist known for her mastery of painting but who has more recently produced installation and video works dealing with environmental devastation.

Del Kathryn Barton

Del Kathryn Barton’s work has a strong foundation of drawing, although she has recently begun to work with painting. She cites artists Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, John Currin and Shirin Neshat as influences, as well as the drawings of Henry Darger, botanical art and fabric design. Her early works featured Egon Schiele-like drawings of naked female bodies entwined with rabbits but also birds and native animals. The explicit nature of the drawings – with the female genitals depicted in detail and the animals often emerging from the female body – have frequently been read as pornographic. However, rather than intentionally explicit or titillating, the drawings are the product of Del’s interest in the relationship between humankind and nature. She sees a spiritual presence residing in the natural world and is concerned with the effect of this on humankind’s physiological and metaphysical existence. – Claire Armstrong, Spring 2004

Del Kathryn Barton, girl #8, 2004, detail; gouache, watercolour and acrylic on polyester canvas, 121 x 85 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist

Nicholas Mangan

In Mangan’s distinctive work the by-products of consumerism are integrated with unique sculptural forms of the artist’s own making. Mangan’s sculpture shares an affinity with the work of many young contemporary artists – such as Ricky Swallow, James Angus and Tim Silver, for example – in which everyday items are deified in sculptural forms distinguished by aesthetic and technical proficiency. However, rather than re-creating objects of everyday use, Mangan incorporates them into new hybrid sculptural forms. – Claire Armstrong, Summer 2004

Nicholas Mangan, Untitled (nest), 2004, detail; aluminium ladder, Western red cedar, Tasmanian oak, 275 x 50 x 170 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Simon Hewson

Astra Howard

Howard\'s public experiments – which she classifies as \'action research\' ... – focus on transitional urban public spaces, such as streetscapes, commuter routes, abandoned infrastructure and pre-construction sites. Positing flux as a defining feature of local public space, these transit zones become a stage and testing-lab for Howard to categorise and characterise the general experience of public space. – Katrina Schwarz, Autumn 2005

Astra Howard, DomestiCITY, 2005; video stills, action research/performance, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, video, 41 mins 37 secs duration; Photograph and video documentation Astra Howard; Action researcher/performers Astra Howard, Todd McCoy, Greta Thiering; 

Amanda Marburg

The journey Marburg takes in the production of her paintings is consequently a continual process of abstraction. This detachment from a depiction of the \'real\' is accentuated in the paintings by a lack of surface texture, in contrast to the malleable plasticine models in which the artist\'s hand, even her fingerprints, are visible. However, the flatness that this lack of texture might convey is counteracted by the unsettling focus in each of the paintings, with some features of the composition thrown into sharp relief and others into shadow and haze, giving an awkward, otherworldly sense of space. – Claire Armstrong, Winter 2005

Amanda Marburg, Giving the devil his due #19, 2004; oil on canvas, 102 x 133 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and OLSEN IRWIN, Sydney; photograph Simon Hewson

Selina Ou

What is striking about Ou\'s photographs is their stillness, frontality and precise compositional structure. For example, Ou\'s 2001 series \'Serving You Better\' uses the commercial settings of a pharmacy, butcher, travel agency and a convenience store. In these images, colourful boxes of medication, rows of bottles and bags of confectionery, stacked produce and the edges of counters and tables form lines parallel to the photographs\' upper and lower edges. These horizontal linear structures define a static matrix within which Ou\'s human subjects pose, facing the camera, motionless, like the inanimate objects around them. – Monte Packham, Spring 2005

Selina Ou, Young couple with deer, Nara, 2005, detail; type-C photograph, 100 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne

Jonathan Jones

The accumulation of light is, in Jones\'s idiom, an attempt to map the network of relations between communities and individuals. Independent light sources come together to create a larger body of illumination, whose interlocking nature ... signals the artist\'s interest in areas of commonality and connection, in overlap and symbiotic flow. It is a fascination Jones locates in his discovery of accounts of the Cadigal people night fishing, as recorded by early colonists observing from the shores of Port Jackson. – Katrina Schwarz, Summer 2005

Jonathan Jones, blue poles, 2004/10; fluorescent lights, transparent synthetic polymer resin, composition board, electrical cord, 168.9 x 285.3 x 65 cm overall; edition of 3 and one museum edition; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; National Gallery of Victoria Collection (purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2010); courtesy the artist; photograph NGV Photo Services

Christian de Vietri

Now that reality television is our surrogate for life experience, it is a truism that objects encountered everyday, on reflection, turn out to be double entendres. Certainty is a relative concept and it follows that relative certainty is as stable as things are going to get. With data circulating at ever increasing rates and in previously unimagined volumes, just how long any \'fact\' remains undisputed is no longer measured with a calendar but by a second hand ... Christian de Vietri ponders just such questions and his works quite literally revel in the specifics that signpost our uncertainty. – Gary Dufour, Autumn 2006

Christian de Vietri, 2nd law, 2004; polyurethane, fibreglass, metal fridge, 110 x 245 x 170 cm; installation view, Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist; photograph Acorn Photography

James Lynch

In James Lynch\'s hands, dreams come to life on the screen as beautifully rendered moments, moving from frame to frame as though the transition from dream-state to gallery has been filtered through a time lapse, the memory hazy in detail but powerful in theme. Lynch is a dream-catcher. He has been working with other people\'s dreams for some time now, dreams in which he is either a central or peripheral figure. These are not nightmares or sweat-soaked erotica, but rather the dreams of little or nothing that take on epic proportions in wakefulness. – Ashley Crawford, winter 2006

James Lynch, I was running and running, 2004; digital video still, 4 mins 17 secs duration; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne

Michelle Ussher

Alongside the foliage and vegetation in Ussher\'s delicately drawn and painted compositions are the paraphernalia of camping and picnicking. Tents, campfires, cars and picnic gear are all represented, beyond which the bush is safely at arm\'s length. Ussher is interested in temporary human occupation of the landscape. Hers is the visitor\'s or tourist\'s view of nature, one full of play and relaxation, a perspective further implied by the postcard-sized paper on which many of her works are completed and by the display of these works as a series of holiday snapshots. – Claire Armstrong, Spring 2006

Michelle Ussher, Picnichead II, 2006, detail; watercolour, aquarelle and pencil on paper, 208 x 130 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney; photograph Greg Weight

Rob McHaffie

There is something delightfully inscrutable in the work of Melbourne artist Rob McHaffie. His humble canvases are strikingly distinctive, revealing an unabashed focus on the figurative and a deliberate avoidance of straightforward narrative ... His works feature perfectly rendered images of everyday objects – unsettling in their clarity and realism – which are then skewed, moulded, displaced and juxtaposed in unlikely relationships. His all-too-human titles, such as I\'d rather be no-one than someone with no-one, 2006, add humour to his intriguing visual repertoire. – Jesse Stein, Summer 2006

Rob McHaffie, Everybody’s got baggage but nobody’s going anywhere, 2006, detail; oil on canvas, 62 x 52 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; photograph Viki Petherbridge

Louisa Dawson

Dawson\'s work is brave: her sculptures are envisaged as permanent fixtures and are often very big – a rare and significant trait in the practice of a young, female, urban sculptor. When I spoke to her in November 2006 she was finalising a large version of her \'rocking ladders’, titled Unsteady work. These ladders are aluminium and 5 metres tall, rocking on a curved base. Dawson is skilled in carpentry, and designed the structural basis for the rocking ladders, but states, \'as for making it rock without killing someone, I\'m leaving that up to the engineers\'. – Jesse Stein, Autumn 2007

Louisa Dawson, Temporary displacement, 2005; rubbish skip, swimming pool tiles, swimming pool ladder, water, 160 x 240 x 130 cm; installation view, Art Academy, Dresden, Germany; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist

Giles Ryder

Describing his work as a ‘hybrid between minimalism, abstraction, op and pop art’, Ryder suggests that his work is actually ‘more abstract’ than a direct reference to automobile culture and aesthetics. ‘It comes back to art and art history. It’s pop but it’s not ... it has more to do with Australian culture.’ With this comment, a whole new set of references emerge – from striped awnings to RSL Club decor. And unlike earlier modernist forms of abstraction, Ryder’s abstraction does not preclude references to popular culture and society. – Jesse Stein, Winter 2007

Giles Ryder, Silver strutter (daze of disco), 2006, detail; video still, HD stop-motion animation, 1 min 29 secs duration, edition 1/5; installation view, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Simon Strong

Mark Hilton

Vast and luminescent, Mark Hilton’s exquisitely detailed lightboxes belie the Melbourne artist’s fascination with the darkest recesses of contemporary experience. As the most striking examples of an expansive and rigorous practice, which incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Hilton’s lightboxes document unsettling topical events – sexual assault, murder, and impropriety in the AFL. Hilton’s further achievement is to represent and re-situate these events within a historically specific aesthetic, expressive of a wider concern with the ‘writing’ of history. – Katrina Schwarz, Spring 2007

Mark Hilton, Champion, 2006, detail; lambda duratran on double-sided lightbox, 180 x 120 x 5 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne

Helen Johnson

Johnson’s works are not what they appear. Their steely strength lies in the way they welcome viewers into a delicately rendered realm, luring us with a false sense of security, only to pull the rug from under our feet. At which point the work’s ‘wallpaper’ is removed, to uncover the gritty grain of life ... In Johnson’s world, appearances are both deceiving and revealing. – Michael Fitzgerald, Summer 2007

Helen Johnson, Assembling a propositional register: individual action in society as environmental science; a dream of the forest (nothing happened in the dream, there was only the complex, wet smell, leaf litter and dimness. He was a part of it), 2006, detail; acrylic, pencil and mixed media, dimensions variable; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Andrew Curtis

Grant Stevens

Stevens treads a fine line between irony and sincerity, and the artist would be the first to admit that his work seeks transcendence from the usual default positions of popular culture: ‘There’s always a contradiction.’ With his short video works, Stevens has cut to the very quick of western culture: Hollywood. Having completed his PhD on notions of editing and text, and believing Hollywood to be ‘the primary myth-making place in terms of film or narrative’, the artist seeks to demystify it. – Michael Fitzgerald, Autumn 2008

Grant Stevens, The way, 2007; lambda print, custom cabinet, car stereo, sound by Rex Goh, 23 mins 37 secs duration, 75 x 197 x 39 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney; photograph Richard Glover

Jamil Yamani

Spanning video and sculptural installation, and with a tight, trained focus on the tropes of exilic experience, Yamani perforates and displaces borders of law, imagination and form. In a single-channel video work from 2005, All quiet on the Western Front ... the artist – now split in two, now literally beside himself – points to the complexity of political and cultural identity in a simple gesture of reciprocity: he takes himself out to dinner ... Although Yamani’s two selves never speak, the artist nevertheless locates surprising spaces of exchange and mutuality. Yamani’s eastern incarnation occupies the western sphere of the screen image; westernised Yamani, the east. – Katrina Schwarz, Winter 2008

Jamil Yamani, family/familiar, 2008; video still, aluminium, fabric, projector, HD video, stereo/audio, approx. 300 x 300 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist

Ash Keating

Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating intercepts and manipulates discarded waste to highlight the ecological fallout of mass-production and global capitalism. Having worked for a waste audit and consultancy company for the past five years, Keating is a self-described ‘witness to the hidden waste that industry creates and disposes of in landfill daily’. His process-based practice thus exposes industry’s gross acts of environmental exploitation and mismanagement, but transcends allegory or mere finger-pointing to present alternative models for environmental reclamation and sustainable living. – Ulanda Blair, Spring 2008

Ash Keating, The uprising #5, 2009, detail; from the series ‘Activate 2750’; type-C photograph, 66 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne

Sara Hughes

Sara Hughes is a heat-seeking device, an artist in search of a pulse in this digitally-enhanced, computer-generated, image-downloadable age. With her abstract wall works of collaged commercial vinyl brightly coloured by consumerism, Hughes calls attention to the connective impulses underlying contemporary life. Her suggestive swirls and painted pixelations illustrate our competing urges to consume or be consumed, for instant gratification or more serious satiation, to delineate or decode the tropes of visual language. – Michael Fitzgerald, Summer 2008

Sara Hughes, Torpedo, 2008, detail; paper tags hand dipped and painted, acrylic paint, dimensions variable; installation view, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; photograph Simon Harper

Kushana Bush

Bush’s aesthetic – with its use of small scale, decorative aspects and stylised figures – permits her often shockingly sexual and gruesome imagery to sneak past our cultural sensitivities. Viewers move closer before they even realise what they’re seeing. And once there, they might as well ask: who and what and why? Yet unlike many of today’s artists and celebrities, Bush is not out to shock. She seeks new ways of discussing the clichéd or contentious. And against the barrage of contemporary imagery and debate, a little artistic sleight of hand is often necessary. – Talia Linz, Autumn 2009

Kushana Bush, Pressed open hook, 2009, detail; gouache and pencil on paper, 100 x 70 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin

Noël Skrzypczak

Skrzypczak’s formalist approach exerts the full power of her materials in psychedelic free-form works, encouraging the kind of everyday transcendental moments that one might experience in finding figures in clouds. Though one could happily remain lost in her technical mastery and the joy of seeing her animated materials frozen in time, Skrzypczak’s clear and often dooming titles generate pathos and push her work into the realm of environmental discourse. – Marni Williams, Winter 2009

Noël Skrzypczak, Cave painting II, 2006, detail; acrylic, dimensions variable; installation view, Grant Pirrie Gallery, Sydney; courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne; photograph Jenni Carter

Jordana Maisie

Maisie’s work promotes a degree of intimacy and playfulness that comes from engaging with the exhibition space. Her self-prescribed task is to make her conceptual ideas manifest in direct experience, honouring human-to-human contact and presenting alternate pathways for interacting with technology. One senses that she achieves her aim by tapping into an irresistible childlike curiosity where movement precludes thinking and technology is made to talk back. – Marni Williams, Spring 2009

Jordana Maisie, The real thing, 2008; mirror acrylic, ice acrylic, aluminium, timber, wire, black tat cloth, HDV camera, Mac mini, data projector, 220 x 220 x 750 cm; installation view, Black and Blue Gallery, Sydney; Ipswich Art Gallery Collection; courtesy the artist

Gregor Kregar

From live sheep to ceramic piggy banks and giant, floating geometric shapes, Gregor Kregar’s sculptural menagerie suggests that he is not an artist seduced by a single subject. Nor can one material tie him down; he picks and chooses between glass and steel, plastic and terracotta, cardboard, video, photography and livestock. Like the varied combinations of polyhedrons he creates, this Slovenian-born, Auckland-based artist is indeed multi-faceted. – Talia Linz, Summer 2009

Gregor Kregar, Piercing the clouds, 2008; stainless steel; video and lambda print photographs; two sculptures, 300 x 250 x 150 cm and 300 x 200 x 150 cm; three wall sculptures, 180 x 120 x 110 cm, 150 x 130 x 100 cm and 80 x 60 x 40 cm; three photographs, 200 x 125 cm each; video, 60 secs duration, dual projection; installation view, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney

Peter Madden

Tenderly lifted from the pages of National Geographic, thumbed encyclopedias and found photographs, old images find new life in the airborne works of Peter Madden. The artist has a consuming passion for visual recycling, dedicatedly pilfering second-hand bookshops and internet trading sites for his library of photographic imagery. Rescued from a life of garage mildew or stagnation in a dentist’s waiting room, Madden imbues these pictures with renewed purpose. In his hands they are painstakingly cut out, pinned, balanced, layered and juxtaposed to create paper microcosms bursting with colour and form. – Talia Linz, Autumn 2009

Peter Madden, She, 2007, detail; found photographs, pins and archival glue, 79 x 54 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne

Susan Jacobs

Unlike an artist who might present objects to encase artistic truths, Jacobs is not particularly concerned with conclusions. She sees her work as a series of exercises in problem-solving and resourcefulness that inevitably develop their own sense of logic. This approach has led her to work in a plethora of mediums incorporating architecture, sculpture, installation, works on paper, video and photography. The sum of her work adds up to a common line of inquiry rather than a signature aesthetic. – Marni Williams, Winter 2010

Susan Jacobs, Side effect, 2008; charcoal, lead, wood, epoxy adhesive, graphite, dimensions variable; installation view, The Narrows, Melbourne; courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout, Melbourne; photograph Jonathan Doncovio

Chantal Fraser

Shrouding her face and body with fabric of varying colour and pattern, at times delicately folded and others tightly bound, Fraser conjures a range of imagery from Magritte’s bound lovers to the Muslim burqa to hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While challenging the traditional meaning and use of this culturally iconic object, the artist also flirts with the idea of body as sculptural form, herself becoming another object to be manipulated within the work. – Talia Linz, Spring 2010

Chantal Fraser, Maiden militia, 2009, detail; type-C photograph, 130 x 110 cm; private collection

Pat Foster and Jen Berean

Observable in Foster and Berean’s recent bodies of work is a strong current and critique that revolves around the politics and impacts of urban planning. Increasingly our public spaces are controlled and monitored through environmental design, closed-circuit cameras, and lighting and sound interventions. Lattices, flat planes and sharp angles are frequently seen in Foster and Berean’s practice, reflecting the idealised ‘grid plan’ of urban design which, far from being a modern phenomenon, stretches back to antiquity. – Kate Warren, Summer 2010

Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Can’t stand up, for falling down, 2010; safety glass, polythene sheet, 130 x 90 x 80 cm; installation view, Murray White Room, Melbourne; courtesy the artists; photograph John Brash

Emma White

Viewers might be forgiven for thinking they have arrived at Emma White’s exhibitions on the wrong day: used coffee cups linger idly next to panes of glass on the gallery floor; Blu-Tack clings to the walls. Yet on closer inspection, these items reveal the sturdy physicality and slightly blurred edges that give them up as artworks. While Post-it notes, packing tape or Mars Bar wrappers might not seem likely harbingers of a sculptural trompe l’oeil, they duly lure us into their details ... These polymer clay ciphers sit stagnant, but just like White’s practice as a whole, they harbour a fragile tension. – Marni Williams, Autumn 2011

Emma White, The plastic arts, 2011; neon, transformers and epoxy enamel on timber panels, 204 x 77 x 20 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney

Sarah Ryan

Sarah Ryan’s photographic imagery is drawn from the unconscious gaps that are created when humans shift their visual attention from one thing to another. Time and movement is therefore prominent in her work, generating subject matter that seems arbitrary in spite of its relative consistency. Ryan’s images appear to have been captured by a photographer in flux; as if created from wandering around her studio or a nearby park, searching not for a conspicuous picture but for a quality of in-betweenness. – Wes Hill, winter 2011

Sarah Ryan, Untitled (detail), 2008–09, detail; digital lenticular photograph, 80 x 117.5 cm; courtesy the artist and Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney

Peter Nelson

From the business district of La Défense in western Paris to the geomorphology of southern China, Nelson is constantly gleaning forms and suspending them within curious non-places. The effect is a kind of surrealist temporal freeze, both enchanting and inhospitable in effect. And so his work not only plays with the perceived permanence of urban architecture, or the impending spoil of natural forms, but also suggests an internal, melancholic terrain – a further example of his work’s intriguing and seemingly infinite heterogeneity. – Talia Linz, Spring 2011

Peter Nelson, Mountain drawing (the first time I felt at home), 2011; perspex and glue, 265 x 420 x 200 cm; installation view, Kudos Gallery, Sydney; courtesy the artist and Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney

Laith McGregor

Long, fantastical beards punctuate Laith McGregor’s blue-biro-on-paper renderings of men with metronomic regularity. Set against starkly empty backdrops, these self-portraits and portraits of friends and family members are usually densely detailed, integrating figuration, abstraction, patterning and sometimes text into the hirsute subjects. What begin as facial studies slowly morph into strangely hypnotic representations as McGregor alters the scale of certain features and allegorically combines his photographic realism with fragments of history, fiction, popular culture and other mythologies. – Helen Hughes, Summer 2011

Laith McGregor, Opal, 2011, detail; permanent marker on tarpaulin, 300 x 240 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney; photograph Jeremy Dillon

Rebecca Baumann

The strength of Baumann’s work lies in the density of her materials and the concentration of human experience – the fleeting orchestration of parts en masse. We can’t get enough of the heady coloured clouds of smoke or avert our gaze away from the glints of light refracting on gold tinsel curtains and yet, at the same time, it is all far too much. Formally her work relies on repetition and return, but there is always the threat of deflation, of being brought back down to earth, or being rudely interrupted by the squeaky surrender of an obnoxious cog in one of her machines. – Leigh Robb, Autumn 2012

Rebecca Baumann, Untitled cascade, 2010/12, detail; tinsel curtain, domestic fan, 1.2k Selecon Zoomspot, dimensions variable; installation view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Collection; courtesy the artist; photograph Bewley Shaylor

Tom Polo

When talking about Polo it is hard to resist quoting his work, so catchy are the titles. It is also hard to circumnavigate the rhetoric of success and failure, which has dominated writing on it. With a practice based in painting, and extending to installation and performance in its investigation, Polo’s work is typified by a self-conscious reflection on art production and its value. More broadly, this is applied to how we seek worth socially. – Susan Gibb, Winter 2012

Tom Polo, A painting of you as me as you looking at me, 2012, detail; acrylic on linen, 60 x 45 cm; courtesy the artist

Alasdair McLuckie

The ritualistic nature of McLuckie’s work is emphasised by his use of folk aesthetics, signature patterning and symbolism. However, instead of beginning with such grand narratives of life and death, his work often has a more simple and formal catalyst: for instance, a straightforward interest in how biro ink appears on the surface of wood ... McLuckie’s work draws on primitive abstraction while his formalist aesthetic tendency is strong, with a scrupulous focus on design, materials and process. – Kelly Fliedner, Spring 2012

Alasdair McLuckie, The sun as my witness, 2010; woven glass seed beads, glass vessels, Perspex, glass beads and timber, 143 x 60 x 55 cm; installation view, West Space, Melbourne; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne

Britt Salt

The materiality of Salt’s artworks is both innovative and deceptive. Sourcing material largely from industrial and hardware stockists, Salt both utilises and subverts the inherent ‘heavy-duty’ qualities of commercial products, such as powder-coated aluminium and industrial mesh, to create instead sculptural and light-based interplays of patterned forms. An heir to a tradition of optical and kinetic art, her practice contains elements of chance and unpredictability. – Jane Button, Summer 2012

Britt Salt, Puzzlethèque, 2012; hand-painted PVC, vinyl, steel, dimensions variable; installation view, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne; courtesy the artist and Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne; photograph Jeremy Dillon

Patrick Francis

Francis is a prolific painter who finds his primary source material in the visual culture of his city and in the art history of western civilisation. A huge range of images attracts his attention and from this basis he is ready to focus and delve into the essence, to the bedrock, of these images. Francis has been drawn especially to the work of Michelangelo, Goya, Raphael, Munch and Gorky, and has a true gift for finding in the paintings of these artists the essential humanity of the subjects as well as showing the attitude and point of view that is often hidden or masked in the pictorial plays of the artist. – Peter Fay, Autumn 2013

Patrick Francis, Not titled (Napoleon), 2012, detail; acrylic on paper, 50 x 70 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Arts Project Australia, Melbourne; photograph Penelope Hunt

Tim Woodward

Woodward wants us to think about why we do the things we do, how we can explain the things we do, and how our explanations of the things we do relate to the act of doing. His ostensibly commonplace objects portray a confounding world in which the creative process and its analysis are fundamentally irresolute. This emphasis on indeterminacy is also suggestive of peripateticism; the off-handed and performative qualities of Woodward’s work foreground the artist’s biographical journeying. – Wes Hill, Winter 2013

Tim Woodward, Master baker, 2012; bread, adjusted aluminum easel, speaker horn, audio commentary, 106 x 89 x 89 cm; installation view, the artist’s studio; courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Sanné Mestrom

Woven throughout Mestrom’s installation-based works are explicit allusions to modernist art history. Iconographic artworks of the twentieth century are appropriated and reconfigured, transformed into something at once naggingly familiar and yet new and strange. Materials are substituted; paintings are reimagined as sculptures. ... This process of translation through which Mestrom shifts and alters her source material allows for a fresh engagement with these modernist masterpieces. – Andrew Purvis, August 2013

Sanné Mestrom, Soft kiss, 2011, detail; cast styrofoam, found object, timber, 120 x 80 x 55 cm; installation view, ‘The Reclining Nude’ (2011), Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; courtesy the artist, Chalk Horse, Sydney, and Utopian Slumps, Melbourne

Karen Black

When I look at Black’s works I find myself searching: for figures, faces, meaning. That’s the power of these paintings – they make you look closely and contemplate the large issues. At a time when art can be so physically demanding, so active – it moves, it makes noise, it requires participation – it can be difficult for a painting to command attention in the same way. Black’s paintings do this by referring to the wider world in which they are produced. They raise questions, create fictions, tell stories, arouse our curiosity, and all the while demonstrate Black’s desire to investigate the properties of colour, surface and paint. – Miri Hirschfeld, November 2013

Karen Black, Flower’s grave, 2013, detail; oil on marine plywood, 67 x 116 cm; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney

Jane Brown

Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne, 2012–13, depicts Brown’s former workplace, but could equally depict a library a century earlier. Her use of aged film stock causes the photograph to appear as an object from another time, while also suggesting the library itself to be somewhat mildewed and dusty. A neat connection exists between the deterioration of film stock leading to the beautiful effects in Brown’s works (initially accidental, now deliberate but still experimental) and the sense of urgency the artist feels in documenting what is sometimes rapidly disappearing subject matter. – Chloé Wolifson, February 2014

Jane Brown, Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne, 2012–13, detail; from the series \'Not Before Time\' (2011–13); fibre-based, gelatin silver print, 27 x 33 cm

Liam O'Brien

Intentionally ambiguous in both form and function, The glaze, 2013, is littered with visual signifiers, art historical references and red herrings, leaving it open to interpretation. From an artist’s perspective, O’Brien tests whether satisfaction can be gained from wilfully investing in the pursuit of an action that he knows to be meaningless. And if there is no such meaning, and all that remains is aesthetics, is that alone enough? – Annika Kristensen, May 2014

Liam O’Brien, The glaze, 2013, detail; high-definition single-channel video, 18 mins 27 secs duration; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney

Zoë Croggon

Subtly alternating between image and object, Croggon introduces a slight gap, as one image, the figurative element, is overlaid onto the other, touching its edge. As before, the lines still converge – line meets pole, shadow meets leg – yet there is this pause that allows for oscillation between connection and disconnection, dependence and independence, as the viewer moves through the space of the gallery. – Aodhan Madden, December 2014

Zoë Croggon, Comalco aluminium used in the construction of the National Gallery of Victoria (after Wolfgang Sievers), 2014; photo-collage, 87 x 60 cm; courtesy Daine Singer, Melbourne

Wanda Gillepsie

This is the productive tension at the heart of Gillespie’s work, the dynamic between physical and imagined dimensions. On viewing her signature diminutive sculptures we are seduced into contemplating the invisible, the imagined and the possible. Yet the objects remain, and their peculiar physical qualities inevitably draw us out of our reverie and back into the physical world. – Julian Murphy, December 2015

Wanda Gillespie, Of masters and spirits, 2013, detail; stoneware, glaze, silver leaf, 25 x 15 cm; courtesy the artist

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

Trying to expose the polemic – why something is feared, sensational, sacred or profane – is key to Abdullah’s practice. His immersive installations explore the elastic borders of a multicultural society hooked on mythology. – Chloe Mandryk, December 2014

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, The obstacle, 2014; Jelutong, buffalo horn, woollen carpet, 48 x 130 x 235 cm; courtesy Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne; photograph Valerie Sparks

Julian Day

In both his solo practice and his collaborative work with Super Critical Mass, Day tests the ways sound makes spatial and social impacts by setting strict parameters for its production within unstable situations, heightening our awareness of its infiltration into our environments and bodies. – Eleanor Zeichner, December 2014

Julian Day, Super Critical Mass (Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste), AURA, 2012; delegated sound performance at Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney; photograph Alex Wisser, image courtesy Super Critical Mass

DEL KATHRYN BARTON

In 2010 ARTAND Foundation invited celebrated Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton to create a new series of works that reinterpreted a classic fairytale. A long time Oscar Wilde enthusiast, Barton was immediately drawn to his The Nightingale and the Rose (1888), a poignant short story that centres on a vulnerable but courageous feminine protagonist. Produced over the course of two years, Barton’s collection reimagines Wilde’s narrative in her enchanting signature style. Using a meditative and meticulous mark making technique, Wilde’s characters take on reinvigorated meaning, luminous in form, they are powerful and magnificent in their physicality. It was a serendipitous moment when in 2012, Barton casually mentioned to acclaimed Australian filmmaker Brendan Fletcher that she was eager to make her Nightingale works into a short film. Despite neither having an animation background, Barton and Fletcher were inspired by their shared vision to offer something new and special to the field. Their ensuing collaboration would combine Barton’s extraordinary feel for the handmade with Fletcher’s dynamic directional skills, while still remaining true to the original text. Over the next three years, Barton and Fletcher worked with award-winning post-production house Method Studios to create their 14-minute animation. A remarkable take on Wilde’s earnest tale, the final production is an intense but stunningly ethereal and visceral journey. With a stirring score by Australian singer-songwriter Sarah Blasko and voiced by some of Australia’s most celebrated actors, Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose is a feat of multidisciplinary, collaborative art practice. Celebrating both the film itself and the exemplary processes behind its creation, Del Kathryn Barton: The Nightingale and the Rose invites visitors into a truly immersive Nightingale world.

Nell / Vanila Netto / Romance Was Born

Nell / Vanila Netto / Romance Was Born artist project, 48.4/Winter 2011. In an issue exploring collaborative practices, this artist project saw black-and-white text paintings by Nell interpreted by Romance Was Born fashion designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales; photographer and video artist Vanila Netto then documented these paintings. The results are a dynamic series of pages inspired by rock music and magazine centrefolds. Developing out of this project was Father mother, 2011, a limited-edition set of two pillowcases.

Kate Beynon – TarraWarra Museum of Art + Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art

Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Kate Beynon pictures the duality of her transcultural self and the alchemy of memory, folklore and contemporary life in her new collection of works staged at TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA). Featuring works on paper, paintings, an animated video and a suspended sculptural installation, the exhibition continues Beynon’s interest in exploring aspects of transcultural life, feminisms and notions of hybridity in a globalised and precarious world. Commissioned by ARTAND our new hardcover publication, An-Li: A Chinese Ghost Talethe works are inspired by a supernatural Chinese story of two young spirits who traverse two diametric worlds, which is beautifully retold in the book by Beynon and Laura Murray Cree. Informed by ancestral imaginings, family connections and travel, the artist borrows from the imagery of ornamental objects she grew up with, her maternal grandfather’s scroll paintings and the iconography of sneakers, jewelry and tattoos that are unique to her family. She then weaves these real world inflections with fantasy in the form of Japanese imagery, Taoist magic calligraphy and comic book graphics to tell the story of the otherworldly lovers. The pair, one earthly the other aquatic, are guided by Kwan Yin a goddess who oversees their path from suffering to healing.

Michael Landy – Kaldor Public Art

London-based artist Michael Landy staged Acts of kindness in Sydney for Art and About Sydney and Kaldor Public Art Projects in September 2011. This project relayed everyday anecdotes about the kindness of strangers. Stories were broadcast through a series of puzzle pieces in various locations throughout the city and Landy’s puzzle-piece drawings were featured in the ARTAND Australia Spring 2011 issue.

Laith McGregor + Romy Ash

Long, fantastical beards punctuate Laith McGregor’s blue-biro-on-paper renderings of men with metronomic regularity. Set against starkly empty backdrops, these self-portraits and portraits of friends and family members are usually densely detailed, integrating figuration, abstraction, patterning and sometimes text into the hirsute subjects. What begin as facial studies slowly morph into strangely hypnotic representations as McGregor alters the scale of certain features and allegorically combines his photographic realism with fragments of history, fiction, popular culture and other mythologies.

Nick Cave

This issue (Vol 46 Number 1 Spring 2008) approaches the Zeitgeist surrounding contemporary art’s ‘dalliance with darkness’, looking between ubiquitous imagery to delve into the history of the dark movement. John Ruskin’s vocabulary: ‘savageness’, ‘changefulness’, ‘naturalism’, and ‘grotesqueness’ aesthetically describe this Spring issues’s featured artists. Tony Oursler reaches into post-punk phantasmagoria, joined by Bardayal Nadjamerrek and Louise Hearman who illuminate the dark through their monographic spectral presence. Francis Upritchard and David Noonan provide ineffable, artistic insight into a shadowed world. It is a resurrection of a cultural past, a reserve of black angst, which is uncovered by Robert Leonard in ‘New Zealand Gothic’. Gothic novelist, Nick Cave, joins Art & Australia and Janine Barrand in a special collaborative curation to produce ‘a menagerie of darks beasts of creation’.

Patrick Pound

In an issue (November 2013) that dedicates the essay section to National Gallery of Victoria exhibition ‘Melbourne Now’ (2013-14) and the focus section to art from Los Angeles, ‘Melbourne Now’ exhibiting artist Patrick Pound created a storyboard for November 2013. An artist who collects and assembles, Pound ‘considers how things hold ideas’. For the project ‘Towards a gallery of air: Between Melbourne and LA’ he links the two cities through ‘air’, from a US Air knife handle to an envelope from Melbourne Airport. Patrick Pound,Towards a gallery of air, 2013 Photographs Andrew Curtis

Matt Coyle

A four-part special commission with Matt Coyle, Hobart-based artist and author of the graphic novel Worry Doll (2007), ‘The Shades’ was presented in ARTAND Australia’s Winter, Spring and Summer issues of 2009, and the Autumn 2010 issue. Coyle’s intriguing narrative begins at night with a drawing of a man digging up his garden and the following proposition: What if you did dig up a descending staircase in your garden? And how would that lead to all sorts of interesting journeys? Such as: coming out into the foyer of Hobart’s Theatre Royal. This in not just a beautiful old theatre but also the place I have worked for many years in the box office. Lots to explore: the relatively banal box office but just nearby an ornate and historical stage, ghostly tunnels beneath, trapdoors… Matt Coyle, The shades #1-8 , 2009 Pen on paper, 40 x 37 cm ARTAND Australia Collection, Courtesy the artist, Criterion Gallery, Hobart, and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne

PRUDENCE FLINT

From the handmade to the finely crafted, this issue also features two ARTAND Australia projects. The first - artist Darren Sylvester’s photographic essay on the Michael Buxton Collection - is part of an ongoing series of collector profiles by contemporary Australian artists. The second, ‘Our Story Begins’, presented in collaboration with The Red Room Company and pairing artists and poets to create new work in dialogue, sees this issue’s pages populated with the words and works of Prudence Flint and Elizabeth Campbell, and Jenny Watson and Ken Bolton.

SUSAN JACOBS AND MICHELLE USSHER

Susan Jacobs and Michelle Ussher, two of the artists featured in Parallel Collisions: 12th Adelaide Biennale of Australia (2012), created Artist Pages for ARTAND Australia’s Autumn 2012 issue based on artworks in the exhibition. Presented collectively, the artists created their own ‘parallel collision’ within ARTAND Australia . Michelle Ussher, The poet, 2011, detail Screen-printed digital print, embossing, silver pigment, pencil and watercolour, 59.5 x 84 cm Printed by Michelle Ussher and Lesley Sharpe at Wimbledon School of Art, London Courtesy the artist and KALIMANRAWLINS, Melbourne

Juan Davila

In Issue 51.3, February 2014, on war, Chilean-born, Melbourne-based artist Juan Davila presented \'White Australia\'s Ghost\', a series of watercolour paintings considering the refugee and Australia. Davila explained: ‘It seems that our culture requires for its survival a vilified figure like the refugee. We steal from them their rights and their freedom. We dupe them. We put their symbolic treasure in circulation for political gain. We delegate belief to the politician’s discourse and deprive ourselves of the naive belief in the other and their potentials.’ Juan Davila, Untitled, 2012-13, detail; gouache and ink on paper, 50 x 65 cm; courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne; photograph Mark Ashkanasy & Juan Davila. Developing from the Artist Project White Australia’s Ghost that featured in Issue 51.3, February 2014, on war, Juan Davila’s ‘Yes’, 2013, offers a message of acceptance and hope. Juan Davila, Yes, 2013; silkscreen on paper, edition of 30, 50 x 65 cm; Larry Rawling Fine Art Prints; Juan Davila; courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne

Ken UNSWORTH

Ken Unsworth is the first major survey book on the senior Australian artist created in collaboration with Anthony Bond and ARTND Foundation. Ken Unsworth is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, whose prolific career has spanned more than six decades, producing iconic works that are recognised both in Australia and internationally. This new book, Ken Unsworth by esteemed art curator Anthony Bond OAM, celebrates the output of his art including major installations, performances, paintings and drawings, land art and his major sculptures from collections around the world. Anthony Bond OAM is the principal author of the book with the contribution of dedicated chapters by Australia’s leading art historians and curators including Daniel Thomas, William Wright, Felicity Fenner, Jill Sykes, Anna Johnson, and René Block who survey Unsworth’s painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, dance collaborations and land art. Available in all good book stores and gallery shops. Published 2018, 252 pp, 380 x 253 mm, fabric-covered hardback, ISBN 978099435355-97

The Nightingale and the Rose

A new series of artworks by Del Kathryn Barton are inspired by the wild energy of Oscar Wilde’s classic story The Nightingale and the Rose. Lusciously illustrated, the book contains 20 new paintings and drawings by the Archibald winning artist to accompany the words of Wilde’s timeless tale of love and loss. Del Barton’s exaggerated aesthetic has given a contemporary feel to a classic fairytale. The theme of ecstatic metamorphosis through song attracted Del Kathryn Barton to this story, where the life of a small bird is offered up for the ideal of love. Barton sees the Nightingale as “the true artist, she gives completely of her deepest essence”.

Artist’s Choice: Five Decades of Artists’ Writing (1967–2014)

Over the years Art & Australia invited artists to write about their favourite work on public view, pairings include Shaun Gladwell on Mike Parr, Russell Drysdale by Tracey Moffatt, John Olsen on Lloyd Rees and Martin Sharp praising Cressida Campbell. Introducing the book Imants Tillers was reminded that “looking at art that moves you confirms the value of art and worthiness of being an artist”.

Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand

Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand is the first comprehensive survey of all that is cutting edge in Australian and New Zealand contemporary practice. In a landmark publication, the book features eighty artists, carefully chosen to best reflect the vibrancy of art of the moment. While Current could be seen as a hot list of contemporary taste in the tradition of Taschen's Art Now, inclusivity is the book's abiding theme. Current is also underpinned by scholarship with commissioned essays by the region's leading writers and curators. Current's beautifully designed pages are filled with many names familiar to followers of contemporary art – including Paddy Bedford, Simryn Gill, Ah Xian, Tracey Moffatt, Shaun Gladwell and Del Kathryn Barton – along with some of the region’s freshest new talents, such as Benjamin Armstrong, Monica Tichacek, Rohan Wealleans, Francis Upritchard and Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, whose photograph of the contents of a German apartment wrapped in orange twine graces the book's front cover. Current captures the unique essence of contemporary practice in Australia and New Zealand, charged with the dynamic between Indigenous, western and Asian cultures. The eighty selected artists encompass a diversity of culture and subject and employ every available medium, from painting, photography and performance to installation and video art. Current's contextual essays are written by leading authorities in their fields, including Robert Leonard, Victoria Lynn, Justin Paton, Rachel Kent, Nick Waterlow and Brenda L. Croft, who has convened an important roundtable of Indigenous curators to explore the question of the contemporary within Aboriginal art.

TONY ALBERT

A comprehensive survey of the multidisciplinary oeuvre of Tony Albert, showcasing why the artist is fast becoming one of Australia’s leading figures in contemporary art. Featuring a foreword by Hetti Perkins and an in-depth interview with the artist by notable curator Maura Reilly, the book explores the complex conceptual undercurrent that pervades Albert’s work. Colour reproductions of the works, from photographs to large-scale installations, reveal the artist’s ongoing interrogation of the politics of colonisation and the flagrant injustices that are still faced by indigenous Australians today.

SAM LEACH

Sam Leach, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists will release his first monograph, Sam Leach, this month at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. With over 20 solo shows to his name, Leach has exhibited extensively at galleries and museums throughout Europe and across the Asia Pacific region. He is known for his virtuosic oil paintings. Executed with exemplary brushwork and encased in resin, Leach demarcates an ongoing investigation of the intersection between humans and animals. Produced by Art and Australia, the comprehensive survey is interspersed with an essay by celebrated, award-winning Australian author Tim Winton and an interview with writer and art critic Andrew Frost. The book abundantly illustrates over fifty of the artist’s major works to date, including the 2010 Archibald winning portrait of Tim Minchin and Proposal for a landscaped cosmos which took out the Wynne Prize the same year.

Khadim Ali

Khadim Ali is a limited edition book of 500 richly illustrated with Ali’s exceptional paintings and tapestries, works imbued with mythological narratives that take aim at contemporary politics. Khadim Ali is participating in The National, painting the foyer wall of Museum of Contemporary Art in February and March 2017. His work is held major institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Select exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, 2009 and Documenta (13), 2012.

Kate Beynon: AN-LI: A CHINESE GHOST TALE

Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Kate Beynon pictures the duality of her transcultural self and the alchemy of memory, folklore and contemporary life in her new collection of works staged at TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA). Featuring works on paper, paintings, an animated video and a suspended sculptural installation, the exhibition continues Beynon’s interest in exploring aspects of transcultural life, feminisms and notions of hybridity in a globalised and precarious world. Commissioned by Art and Australia for our new hardcover publication, An-Li: A Chinese Ghost Tale, the works are inspired by a supernatural Chinese story of two young spirits who traverse two diametric worlds, which is beautifully retold in the book by Beynon and Laura Murray Cree. Informed by ancestral imaginings, family connections and travel, the artist borrows from the imagery of ornamental objects she grew up with, her maternal grandfather’s scroll paintings and the iconography of sneakers, jewellery and tattoos that are unique to her family. She then weaves these real world inflections with fantasy in the form of Japanese imagery, Taoist magic calligraphy and comic book graphics to tell the story of the otherworldly lovers. The pair, one earthly the other aquatic, are guided by Kwan Yin a goddess who oversees their path from suffering to healing.

Chinese Zodiac

Edited by Art & Australia

Chinese Zodiac presents a dynamic new series of artworks created by twelve of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, with an introduction by Benjamin Law. The book explores the relationship between humans and animals, the East and the West, through a diverse series of artworks responding to the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, accompanied by written responses to each artist’s chosen zodiac animal.

Sam Leach | John Young | Michael Zavros | Joshua Yeldham | Kate Beynon | Lindy Lee | Tim McMonagle | eX de Medici | Caroline Rothwell | Christian Thompson | Dane Lovett | James Morrison

25/25

A collaboration between media art initiative NOISE and ARTAND Australia, this project profiled twenty-five visual artists aged between eighteen and twenty-five who work in Australia. 25/25 featured artists are Sam Barratt, David Capra, Ben Constantine, Yvette Coppersmith, Claire Dawson, Louisa Dawson, Kate Dickson, Sean Fennessy, Sarah Firth, Grzegorz Gawronski, Emily Hunt, Dane Lovett, Morganna Magee, Tonee Messiah, Paul Mosig, Simon Noynay, Anna Pogossova, Andrew Quilty, Marlaina Read, Briony Ridley, Leigh Rigozzi, Samuel Shepherd, Sam Shmith, Dustin Voggenreiter and Luke Wong. The selection demonstrates a diverse array of artistic practice and disciplines, including sculpture, performance, street art, painting, drawing, printmaking, moving-image installation, digital media and photographs.

KATHMAN SAVES THE WORLD

We are pleased to offer a platform to Kathman Saves the World, a narrative by young author Sangay Linkins, illustrated by street artist Shraddha Shrestha, in support of The Phenday Foundation, which offers a home for destitute Nepalese children. Young Kathman is an environmentally conscious cat who saves the world from the advent of the melting Himalayas. Linkins was 11 years old when he imagined this thrilling tale. In the spirit of the story, all proceeds from the book will benefit the children cared for by Phenday in the Gorkha district of Nepal. The children now reside in Pharping, a sacred Buddhist pilgrimage site and are looked after by a team lead by Yogi Rinpoche.

MURRAY ART MUSEUM ALBURY

The ARTAND Foundation has donated the Art & Australia library of more than 2,000 books and magazine collections to the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) to support the museum and its education partners, Riverina TAFE, La Trobe University, Wodonga TAFE and schools. After two years of major redevelopment, the new Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) opened in October as one of the state's largest exhibition spaces. The new Museum has colonised the old gallery building and the neighbouring Burrows House, doubling the former Albury Regional Gallery exhibition area with ten galleries.

ART MONTH 2010

To coincide with Sydneys inaugural Art Month in March 2010, ARTAND Australia created a special gallery guide for children and families. Featuring artists such as Pat Brassington, Adam Cullen, Marita Fraser, John Olsen, Rusty Peters and Imants Tillers, and exhibitions in 17 galleries across Sydney, this Family Gallery Trail presented activities for children and their family to engage with contemporary art.

The sound of red earth

In August 2010, ARTAND Australia collaborated with Kaldor Public Art Projects to develop a children’s activity sheet accompanying Stephen Vitiello. The sound of red earth; a soundscape of recordings made by the artist throughout the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Installed in the historic former Brickworks at Sydney Park, the project transformed the kilns into an immersive environment that evoked the remote Australian landscape.

Emerging Writers Program

The Gertrude Contemporary and ARTAND Australia Emerging Writers Program 2005 - 2014 was a selective mentorship program that developed from a Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, initiative. It pairs four emerging writers with leading arts specialists each year. We offered participants the opportunity to develop their writing practice, publish their works and gain further insight into the field of contemporary art writing, featuring their work in the pages ARTAND through Gertrude Contemporary’s Studio 12 exhibition program. Participants included; Toby Miller. Clarissa Chikiamco, Leon Goh, Anusha Kenny, Nicholas Croggon, Brooke Babington, Rachel Watts, Helen Hughes, Susan Cohn, Harriet Morgan, Kelly Filedner, Kate Warren, Marian Tubbs, Summar Hipworth, Serena Bentley, Scott McCulloch, David Homewood, Ash Kilmartin, Alison Lasek, Tess Maunder, Andrew Purvis, Miri Hirschfeld, Chloe Wolifson, Aniika Kristensen, Aodhan Madden, Julian Murphy, Chloe Mandryk and Eleonor Zeichner.

The Australian Financial Review

Long before Eleonora Triguboff became publisher of Art & Australia magazine and a philanthropist, the Latvian-born Sydneysider was an artist. As a teenager living in Rome in the 1970s, a shopfront in the Piazza di Spagna beneath the Spanish Steps frequently captivated her. The windows displayed bronze furniture designed by two surrealist artists for an Italian brand.

Chilean-born Roberto Matta created exaggerated royal thrones; Swiss-born Meret Oppenheim made a table resting on what appeared to be bird's legs. Triguboff would graduate in 1982 with a bachelor of arts from John Cabot, an American university in Rome, majoring in art history, but decide New York was where she needed to be to emulate such outlandish design aesthetics.

By 1985, she had majored in interior design at Parson's School of Design on Fifth Avenue and was exhibiting, in group exhibitions in SoHo, her own curvaceous, seductive, sculpted furniture designed in bronze, aluminium and wood. By the early '90s, she had graduated to solo exhibitions.

"There was a whole group of us in New York, taking what is supposed to be design, and saying, 'Let's stretch it, let's make it uncomfortable'," she recalls now.

We are seated on plump sofas in her family home in Sydney's eastern suburbs, in the study used by her husband, investment manager Michael Triguboff, nephew of property magnate Harry Triguboff. Eleonora's influence is everywhere: three large, dark Bill Henson photos hang opposite a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases; behind us, cross-hatched poles by Gumatj artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.

The couple's children are finishing their HSC this year, and Eleonora, who stopped making art more than 20 years ago to raise a family and become an influential art publisher, is about to step down as an Art Gallery of NSW trustee after nine years.

In 2003, she acquired Art & Australia, first published by Sam Ure Smith in 1963,publishing the quarterly for a dozen years and changing the masthead to ARTAND in 2013. She particularly championed artists in the first five years of their professional development, using the back cover to show off works by such early career artists, who have gone onto bigger things: Del Kathryn Barton, Jonathan Jones and Christian de Vietri among them. Art & Australia acquired all those emerging artists' featured works, and is now gifting 27 works to the Art Gallery of NSW. The Art & Australia Emerging Artist Collection will go on public display next year. - Steve Dow, The Australian Financial Review, 20 August 2016

Look Magazine, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Artist, art-lover, publisher, philanthropist… former trustee Eleonora Triguboff’s journey has been one of many steps, writes Helen O’Neill. For Eleonora Triguboff, walking into Out of the ordinary: works from the ARTAND emerging artist collection is a somewhat surreal experience. As she moves through the AGNSW exhibition, the former publisher and editor-in-chief of Art & Australia magazine (which later became ARTAND) explains how during her 13-year tenure the journal acquired a significant art collection through its prize for early-career artists.

‘This started with the concept: It’s not mine; one day it will go somewhere as a collection,’ she says. Yet coming face-to-face with the artworks in their new location remains ‘a little strange’. A number, including Grant Stevens’ laconic, road-trip-inspired sculptural video The way 2007, spent time in Triguboff’s Sydney office. Jonathan Jones’ florescent blue poles 2004 illuminated the Triguboffs’ study. Sara Hughes’ Torpedo 2008, an enormous work comprised of hundreds of sale tags, was on the living room wall.

Piece by piece, the ARTAND emerging artist collection grew to represent an impressive cohort of promising Australasian artists, including Christian de Vietri, Del Kathryn Barton, Ash Keating and Selina Ou. Before the works became a part of family life, the collection toured to Ballarat, Dubbo, Gippsland, Hazelhurst and Ipswich in a partnership with Newcastle Art Gallery, allowing regional audiences to view works by some of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.

In 2016 Triguboff gifted the 27 works in the collection to the AGNSW. Out of the ordinary is its first curated airing at the Gallery – a snapshot of the varied, experimental, mesmerising work being generated in Australia and New Zealand in the early 2000s. Triguboff is quick to point out that she did not select these works herself, but in conjunction with an advisory board that included the late Nick Waterlow, Brian Ladd, Joanna Capon, Anna Waldmann, Rex Butler, Gene Sherman, Max Delaney and Justin Paton. She has a separate, personal, art collection but this was always different.

Directly opposite Torpedo at Triguboff’s house stood Untitled (nest) 2004 by Nicholas Mangan, a sculpture depicting a stepladder transmogrifying from aluminium into decaying Tasmanian oak. This, she says, as she walks towards it, was one of the earliest pieces purchased. It ‘lived’ in her house for a long time.

Triguboff describes how the artwork speaks to her of ‘the conflict in terms of modernity … [how] we are these old souls but we need to deal with a very contemporary world’, and how ‘when we merge those together we are beautiful but fragile’. ‘Conceptually this work is extraordinary, and it delivers at the highest aesthetic level,’ she says.

Ladders might be said to represent transition, and Triguboff’s life has certainly been one of many steps. Born in Latvia, she was six when her family moved to Israel, and 12 when she started school in Rome. ‘I am highly aesthetic [and] I think one of the main reasons for it is that I’m dyslexic, so through school and through my life my “language” has been totally visual,’ she says. She eventually studied art history and moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design where she began conceptualising ‘crazy furniture that no one can sit at, no one can eat off’.

One of her teachers introduced her to influential Art et Industrie gallery owner Rick Kaufmann, who looked at her drawings and threw down a challenge: if she could produce what was in them in two months he would feature her in an upcoming group show. ‘I did it,’ she says. ‘I was in the gallery from then on. I was its only woman artist for some time.’

In 1993 Triguboff and her husband moved to Sydney where she ceased working as an artist and concentrated on raising a family. ‘My last show in New York I called Exposed [because] I believe every artist, when they mount a show, is really exposed,’ she says. Then, some 10 years later, ‘when the opportunity came to become a publisher and editor I knew it was my destiny to repeat what happened to me, of someone saying, “If you can do it, I’ll give you a chance”.’

As well as the quarterly magazine, Triguboff’s publishing career included collaborations on artist books for children, an art history anthology and artist monographs. She was appointed to the architects advisory panel for Sydney Modern, the advisory board of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and, in 2008, became a government-appointed Trustee of the AGNSW, a role she stepped down from this year, having served the maximum term. ‘I loved my time as a Trustee,’ she says, outlining satisfaction in helping to develop the future of the Gallery and advocating ‘for contemporary, emerging [art], a little bit of the fringe’. In 2016 she donated ARTAND to the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, and gifted the ARTAND emerging artist collection to the AGNSW – two acts of benefaction intended to sustain public access, interest and education in visual art.

Now, more change is in the air, in part because her three children are embarking on their next chapter at university. In another step to support the arts, Triguboff has formed the ARTAND Foundation, working directly with Australian artists such as Khadim Ali and Ken Unsworth on independent books. She is also establishing ‘a little project’ in the Southern Highlands, a property in part designed to provide studio space to established artists creating major commissions. ‘I’m also going to invite writers, musicians and so on to come in and spend time there… to recharge,’ she says. She also intends to dive back in as a practising artist. Such ‘separations’, from one stage of life to another, are not easy, she muses, as she departs and Mangan’s ladder recedes slowly from view. Helen O’Neill is a Sydney-based writer. Her most recent books are Daffodil – Biography of a Flower (HarperCollins) and A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler (HarperCollins).