Like many of the people at Balgo, Elizabeth Nyumis early life was a nomadic existence with her family group on the Canning Stock Route. Whe her mother died she walked with her father into the old Catholic mission at Balgo. She began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. Recently a very successful painter, she was invited to show at the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. OBrien examines Nyumis life and work.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is now just a little over a year old. Housed in a purpose-built venue at Federation Square in Melbourne , ACMI is home to two multi-format cinemas, a variety of exhibition, education and production zones and the Screen Gallery, the largest of its kind in the world and, arguably, the jewel in ACMIs crown. Gye looks at the recent success of the new Screen Gallery and the future direction of ACMI.
Melentie Pandilovski, the Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, sees the current manifestation of the word experimental in Experimental Art Foundation as relating to biotechnology, consciousness and the places taken up by artist in scientific places where experiments are the usual tasks at hand. In a move away from dry hard-wired technologies the last five years has seen a rise of wetwork and a new subculture within science as artists find new roles in scientific laboratories and ask fresh moral, ethical and aesthetic questions.
The twenty-first century, it seems, will not be the age of manifestos. Like advertising campaigns and the design of cars and other consumer items, contemporary art has started to look the same....there is no agenda, no politics, no historical claims. As McLean states, for Derek Kreckler, the point of being an artist today is not how well you resist this condition, but how well you can bend it to your own ends. Krecklers work is here positioned in a postminimalist rather than a postmodernist framework.
RMIT Gallery, Storey Hall, Melbourne 21 July - 13 September 2003 McClelland Art Gallery, Langwarrin 4 November 2003 - 8 March 2004 Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 4 October - 7 December 2003
Floating Land 2003 was an event held as part of Noosa Regional Gallerys second major biennial site-specific art project that ended in high drama at 3am on the top of a mountain and one that unexpectedly created a new lobby group. The emphasis for this project was on experimentation both in terms of the art and the notion of what consitutes an event/festival that takes place over a period of time.