Noel McKennaLandscape Tells the Way: Illawarra, Curated by Riste Andrievski, Wollongong Art Gallery, NSW,9 March - 2 June 2024

Lying to the south of Sydney, the Illawarra region has long been studied and celebrated by artists and writers, from Conrad Martens, Max Dupain, DH Lawrence and Charmian Clift to Brett Whiteley and Gary Shead. It's creative history extends back more than 60,000 years in a vibrant and continuous connection to Country, through the cultural disruption of colonisation, and periods of boom and bust as different industries and people have moved to the area and shaped the landscape around them.

Landscape Tells the Way: Illawarra brings together 13 contemporary artists who share a connection to the region, and features their unique perspectives on the local landscape.

Artists: Riste Andrievski, Suzanne Archer, Sophie Cape, Elisabeth Cummings, Warwick Keen, Steve Lopes, Jo Lyons, Euan Macleod, Noel McKenna, Reg Mombassa, Idris Murphy, Lucy O'Doherty and Amanda Penrose Hart.

James Tylor: Turrangka...In the Shadows opening at Goulburn Regional Gallery - March 15

Multi-disciplinary artist James Tylor combines historical and contemporary photographic processes to explore his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch and Norwegian) ancestry.

James Tylor Turrangka…in the shadows  is a UNSW Galleries exhibition curated by Leigh Robb that surveys a decade of Tylor’s practice and, for the first time, brings together the most comprehensive selection of his unique daguerreotypes, expansive digital photographic series, and hand-made Kaurna cultural objects. The exhibition title is drawn from a Kaurna word, highlighting a significant ongoing aspect of Tylor’s practice: the learning and sharing of his Indigenous language. As well as shadow, turra also translates to reflection, image, and mirror.

Together within James Tylor's solo exhibition Turrangka...in the shadows, Tylor and Robb will speak to the diverse bodies of work on display, and the journey taken to bring this exceptional show and corresponding publication to life. With a broad range of material approaches, Tylor's practice is one worth getting to know, for artists, curators and art-lovers alike. 

The corresponding exhibition publication ‘James Tylor: Turrangka... in the shadows’ will also be available to purchase. Developed with the generous support of Vivien Anderson Gallery, this 160-page publication features contributions by James Tylor, Leigh Robb, Coby Edgar, Geoffrey Batchen and Caitlin Eyre.

Joseph Häxan's new interview with Alasdair Foster for Talking Pictures

Art, science, magic, religion, and philosophy were once a single quest to make sense. It was only with the advent of the modern age that this holistic mission became divided into distinct disciplines, each with its own ways of thinking and doing. In turn, each discipline begat its various specialisms and sub-specialties. And, while this narrowing and sharpening of focus allows for deeper penetration into the subsoil of all we do not know or cannot yet express, it also isolates each purview drawing horizons closer the deeper it drills down. Meanwhile, each scion inherits their practices and ways of thinking from what has gone before, refining and building on them a kind of cognitive performance; rituals of the mind that anchor them to what is understood amid the endless tracts of what is not.

For the Australian artist Joseph Häxan it is the allure of that vast unknown that beguiles his imagination. He draws not on any one branch of knowledge but on the primeval abyss of the occult. Taking his own body as a kind of sorcerer’s familiar, he undertakes rituals that combine mysticism and modern technology, embodying the personal and the cosmic, the esoteric and the erotic. It is a kind of performance approached at a tangent. Rather than conceiving an idea or character and expressing it physically, he uses his body to bring forth new ideas and feelings. Like ritual, it is a process that relies on pattern and repetition, but these patterns are not an encoding of what is known or believed but rather a mantra whispered into the darkness to discover what echo or response might come.

These unorthodox images arise at the intersection of ancient and modern, proficiency and uncertainty. A skilled compositor and fan of genre fiction, Joseph Häxan is a child of his generation, but his eyes peer back into the mists of time, his skin seeks the caress of the unknowable, his psyche opens to the darkness of the abyss. Just as psychologists describe that which is not like us as ‘the other’, so he seeks to enter that ‘other’ world which is no longer ours, his body bared at the behest of unfettered imagination. And just as the psychological phenomenon of ‘the other’ defines the self as real by being perceived as separate from it, so these other worlds become a black mirror in which the artist perceives an extended sense of his own reality.

Alasdair Foster

Read the complete interview below:

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