Anne Wallace (Critics' Picks) (original) (raw)

A Surrealist Impulse in Contemporary Australian Photography

2007

Pat Brassington's photographs began to receive critical attention in the 1980s when photographic theory and criticism was experiencing a renaissance. Her work spoke loudly in a postmodern culture that deconstructed notions of the original and authenticity, interrogated the epistemology of the gaze and the stereotypes of feminine sexuality. Her use of found photographs, collage and digital manipulation marked her clearly as an artist who engaged with the reproducibility and performativity of the medium. Brassington is part of a generation of post-feminist artists who followed on from the breakthroughs made by Cindy Sherman in the US and Mary Kelly in the UK. Although Brassington does not photograph herself exclusively, she does embrace a performative approach to photography, which is used to situate an uncanny female presence. Like Mary Kelly, she is interested in psychoanalysis and how the subject is inscribed in language, although Brassington's work does not have the same political compulsion. Performative approaches to photography are ubiquitous in contemporary work, much of which has a surreal impulse as well as drawing on performance art actions. Rebecca Horn's Arm Extensions (1970) and Louise Bourgeois's Costume for A Banquet (1978) are early examples. This practice continues with artists such as Yasumasa Morimura who, like Cindy Sherman, uses his own body to act out multiple personae. Anna Gaskell's series By Proxy (1999) explores fantasy and real-life stories to present a sinister and seductive picture of a nurse who murdered her young patients. There is a surreal edge to this narrative in Gaskell's series, which has something in common with Pat Brassington's exploration of the dark underside of lived experience. But Brassington's work is more abstract and difficult to pin down since the narrative is always confounded for the viewer. Writing about her work in 2004, she said:

Modernist Exoticism: The Voyage Out and In

2013

Much research has been done on how well-known male writers produced fi ctions about colonial spaces and how they discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the 'art of fi ction' debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers-famous and less famous-contribute, fi rst, to colonial fi ction and, second, discuss matters of aesthetics in those years? This volume links fi ctional, nonfi ctional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late-nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of 'exoticism', arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a 'self' encountering an 'other' results in the interrelated predicament to fi nd poetic modalities-mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other-that befi t an 'exotic' representation. Thus women writers participated not only in the making of colonial fi ctions but also in the late-nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fi ction This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of diff erence-self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness-onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-ofthe-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically underresearched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.

Imaging Aboriginal women in Australian art and portraiture 1788-1960

Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 2020

The significance and relevance of this article is that it identifies and surveys a group of artists who made portraits of Australian Aboriginal women prior to 1960. While the artists are known to the public individually, their acknowledgement as a group who share the same interest in the portraiture of Aboriginal women has not been investigated before. This article explores the historical imaging of Aboriginal women in Australian art and portraiture from 1788 to 1960, a period defined by two distinct phases in relation to Aboriginal people. The first phase from 1788 to the 1930s is characterised by a simplistic interpretation of Aboriginal art and people, which tended to reflect evolutionist and ethnographic influences. The second phase from the 1930s to 1960, is characterised by increased anthropological emphases. When these phases are considered in light of the depiction of Aboriginal women in Australian portraiture, interesting characteristics are revealed. Historical change indi...

No Boundaries: Australian Aboriginal Contemporary Abstract Painting

2015

The rise of the Aboriginal Australian art movement in the early 1970s ushered in an artistic revolution. But like any important revolution, it did not stop there. As the twenty-first century approached, Aboriginal artists across the continent began transforming their traditional iconographies into more abstract styles of art making. Speaking across cultures, without sacrificing their distinctive identities, they found new ways to express the power of the ancestral narratives of the Dreaming. Drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, No Boundaries features the work of nine trailblazing artists who were at the forefront of this movement: Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, Prince of Wales (Midpul), Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Billy Joongoora Thomas, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, and Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Each one was a respected senior Lawman, knowledgeable in every aspect of Aboriginal ceremonial traditions. Inspired by these ancient cultural practices, they forged one of the most dynamic painting movements of recent times. By exploring the cross-cultural potential of abstract painting, they drew attention to the entangled networks that define the contemporary experience, reminding us that contemporary art comes from every corner of the globe. The art and life of each artist is given in-depth analysis by leading art historians, curators, critics, and anthropologists. The essays shed light on the rich and complex histories behind the artworks, placing them in the context of traditional Indigenous culture, the environment, colonial experience, and the global contemporary art world. In doing so, they reveal nine artists working at the vanguard of contemporary art practice. Includes new essays by Henry F. Skerritt, John Carty, Edwina Circuitt, William L. Fox, Stephen Gilchrist, Jens Hoffmann, Darren Jorgensen, Emily McDaniel, Ian McLean, Fred Myers, Una Rey, Quentin Sprague, and Luke Scholes.

Aboriginal Women's Portraiture Margaret Olley and Julie Dowling

Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 2022

Portraits of Australian Aboriginal women have historically reflected artistic styles, changing perceptions and the unique characteristics of the individual artist, but it was not until the 1950s that Aboriginal women began to be presented by Australian portraitists in a more humanistic and holistic way. In the 1960s, a shift took place in the way Aboriginal women were portrayed, when the Australian artist Margaret Olley [1923–2011] focused upon Aboriginal women differently. She imaged Aboriginal women in terms of painterly aesthetics, ignoring the societal, racial and historical meanings that could have been symbolically attached to her imagery if she had chosen to do so. This article focuses firstly on Olley’s contribution and its interpretation by the Gamilaroi art historian, Donna Leslie. It then extends the investigation of Aboriginal women’s portraiture in contemporary Australian art through the exploration of a select group of paintings by the portraitist Julie Dowling (1969– ), of the Badimaya people of Western Australia. This article is written by an Indigenous Australian author.

Alien nation: contemporary art and black Britain

2011

About the book: This fascinating text introduces readers to postcolonial theory using the context of British media culture in ethnic minority communities to explain key ideas and debates. Each chapter considers a specific media output and uses a wealth of examples to offer an absorbing insight into postcolonial media for all students of cultural and media studies.

Beyond "Australian Impressionism": The Art of Settler-colonialism

After a book, exhibition and several earlier articles, this represents my latest and final attempt to sum up the historiographical back-story to 12 years of research about late 19th-century Australian art. Discussions of Australia’s settler-colonial visual culture have long been focussed on the landscapes and bush scenes of Melbourne’s Australian impressionist painters. However, it was the wood-engraved pictures reproduced in colonial Australia’s lively illustrated press, especially in Sydney, that both dominated its visual culture between 1850 and 1900 and influenced these Victorian artists. By giving greater prominence to Sydney’s artist-illustrators what emerges into clear view is an Australia-wide art movement defined not only by its racialized, masculinist, and triumphalist settler iconography but by its continuing reliance on Britain’s imperial art-world for its art-workers and aesthetic direction as well. It nevertheless took an American-inspired enterprise—The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia—to help catalyse this movement’s coming of age in the mid-1880s. Between the exodus of Australia’s leading settler-colonial artists to London around 1900 and their return to these shores after the First World War, the locus of their movement oscillated between Sydney and the Chelsea Arts Club. A century later their vision of a White Australia remains attractive to many art lovers, a conundrum for those seeking to hasten Australia’s stubbornly slow transition to a truly post-colonial society.