Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
ngurra (camp/home/country) is a collaborative installation by Anne Mosey and Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels. The title is derived from the Walpiri word ‘ngurra’, which can mean either camp, home or country.
In their installation for the 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992), Nampijinpa Daniels and Mosey created parallel domestic environments, characteristic of each artist’s life, in a poignant display of cultural contrasts. The artists will develop and extend these themes at the University of South Australia Art Museum in a space which is significantly larger and more sympathetic than that provided by the Biennale, and with the benefit of their greater subsequent experience in the creation of such a work.
Nampijinpa Daniels is a Warlpiri woman from around Yuendumu who, along with her family, are the traditional owners of many Dreaming sites in that area. Mosey’s relationship to the land, on the other hand, is a family history of six generations of European settlement in the mid-north of South Australia – a history of explorers and pastoralists. The collaboration between these artists does not assume that there is easy progress to an ideal consensus. It may be, in fact, that the proposals of each artist, although sympathetically joined in friendship, will reflect positions of mutual independence. The crucial question of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relationship will thus be a major element in the project’s outcomes.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition for the 1994 Adelaide Festival. Catalogue essays by Petronella Vaarzon-Morel and Kerry Giles. Assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and also by the Women’s Suffrage Centenary of South Australia 1984-1994.
The Lure of Unrealised Desire is a visionary exhibition which has evolved physically from discarded photographic fragments taken by Ed Douglas from the School of Art’s darkroom rubbish bin. The artist sees this unusual image source as expressing aspects of Carl Jung’s notion of the ‘collective unconscious’. Exposed to light, the photographic scraps acquire a range of mineral colours – deep chemical blues and purples, cold browns and sickly oranges – all of which invade the tenuous remnants of rejected landscapes and faces.
Much amplified, these found images are used to construct new ideas and meanings which have been influenced by the artist’s literary interests in the areas of psychology and myth. A narrative work The Lure of Unrealised Desire depicts a masculine mythic journey. Douglas freely admits to being influenced by a subjective reading of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Douglas obtained his Master of Fine Arts at the San Francisco State University, where he worked with Jack Wellpott, John Guttmann and Imogen Cunningham. He was a founding member of the Visual Dialogue Foundation, established in the early 1970s. Since settling in Australia in 1973, Douglas has exhibited extensively and is represented in a number of collections including the CSR Collection, the National Gallery of Australia and the Parliament House Collection.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Catalogue essay by John Neylon.
Lynne Barwick, Sarah Lindner, Michele Beevors, ADS Donaldson, Anne Ooms, Robyn Stacey, Matthew Calvert, Carl Sutherland, Paul Uhlmann and Anne Wallace
An exhibition selected from work by the ten successful recipients of the 1993 Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships.
The Samstag scholarships are Australia’s most valuable awards for visual artists, and were established through the bequest of American artist, Gordon Samstag, who taught from 1961 to 1972 at the South Australian School of Art. Samstag died in 1990, at the age of 83, in Florida, USA.
The ten artists, drawn from a national field of candidates, will receive funding for all their reasonable costs, to pursue further studies in the visual arts at institutions overseas, including New York, Berlin, Prague, Copenhagen, London and Belfast.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition.
Fiona Hall, Bronia Iwanczak, Michelle Nikou, Bronwyn Platten, Jyanni Steffensen and Linda Marie Walker
In 1894, South Australia became the first place in the world in which women could both vote and stand for parliament. The exhibition Fania is presented by the Art Museum in association with the Women’s Suffrage Centenary celebrations in this state, to honour the inspirational achievement of the suffrage women.
Conceived respectfully in the spirit of commemorating women’s suffrage, Fania, as a ritual of observance, is nevertheless more recalcitrant than it is deferential to history. Rather, it exemplifies the gloriously propagative upheaval and diversity of positions which are characteristic of contemporary feminism, and which take as right the prerogatives of independence.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Curated by Erica Green. Catalogue essays by Judy Annear, Kate Brennan, Brenda Ludeman, Penny Magee and Rachel Moss.
Neville Assad, Rod Bamford, Susan Cohn, Martin Corbin, Catherine K, Helmut Lueckenhausen, Lisa Pittar, Neil Roberts, Sue Rosenthal and Maureen Williams
"One the one hand, there is the world of the crafts, where makers take pleasure in producing objects whose worth extends beyond their immediate usefulness. And on the other hand, there is the world of the trades and professions, where workers provide services or products whose prime focus is the needs of the clients they attempt to satisfy."
Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions explores links between the crafts and the trades and professions with whom they share a special affinity. Curator Kevin Murray invited ten crafts practitioners to make works that respond to a paired occupation.
In Symmetry, ceramic works are constructed to relate to bread making, jewellery to dentistry, woodwork to surgery, weaving with journalism and glass with jazz trumpet.
An AETA travelling exhibition. Curated and brochure text by Kevin Murray.
Elizabeth Abbott, Stirling Greeneklee, Greg Geraghty, Josephine Starrs and Trevor Van Weeren
Selected works by University of South Australia Master of Visual Art and Graduate Diploma students and graduates.
