Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
This exhibition reviews 25 years of paintings by Barrie Goddard, from the early 1970s to 1995. During this period Barrie Goddard also taught at the South Australian School of Art.
Commencing in a period of great change in Australian visual arts, Goddard’s early works exemplify much of the prevailing concerns of their time. From the early seventies, Australian artists were increasingly focused on recent developments in New York, undertaking paintings of large scale and which reflected the reductive tendency of American hard-edge abstraction.
The exhibition also traces the artist’s maturation through his subsequent experiments. Barrie Goddard: Paintings 1970 – 1995, represents a journey through colour, space and light and attests to Goddard’s understanding and feel for arid landscape, an environ he has passionately engaged as subject throughout his career.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Curated by Erica Green. Catalogue essays by John Stringer and John Neylon.
This is an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions which have been constructed as models, in bronze and wood, from a selection of his numerous sketches. No single person in recorded history exemplifies the inventive capacity of humanity more fully than Leonardo, who investigated virtually every field of science and art.
Many of Leonardo’s inventions anticipated twentieth-century mechanical science and were derived from his observations of nature and natural forces. For example, he based designs of helicopters and other flying machines on observations of birds and their use of wings.
Leonardo was the quintessential renaissance man of 15th century Florence. He worked under the patronage of Cosimo de Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent in a city that flowered commercially as well as culturally. It was a period in history where knowledge, culture and technology expanded as never before.
The exhibition presents twenty-three working models, drawn from the International Business Machines Corporation collection. They include devices for measurement and traffic control, to flying machines and weapons. Wherever possible the models are interactive, and are displayed so that even the smallest visitor can view each object.
A University of Technology Sydney in conjunction with IBM Australia travelling exhibition. Curated and catalogue essay by Susan Peacock.
An exhibition of traces from Scottish artist Peter Hill’s splendid fiction, the Museum of Contemporary Ideas. Located somewhere on New York’s Park Avenue, the museum installation features an equally fictitious art fair.
The time is two hours before the art fair is due to open and the press have been allowed in to preview the work. Some works have still to be hung and the air is filled with a mixture of excitement tinged with mild panic. There have been delays in Chicago and Frankfurt and not all the artworks have arrived. Some gallery booths have still to remove the crates and wrapping from their territory, while others are ready to go and are uncorking the champagne.
The serious side of Peter Hill’s project examines the mechanics of paradigm change in late 20th century art, asking why and how do art movements change? Biennales, art fairs, the Documenta, jet travel and the virus-like spread of glossy international art magazines are highlighted as the leading forces of change in the synthetic modernist era.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Catalogue essay by Peter Hill.
BCF are the initials of Bonython Clemon Fuller and the title of Helen Fuller's descriptive installation, which has its origin in the materials collected, constructed and stored away in her father's backyard shed, over many decades.
The mysteries and meanings of the shed are cyclopean. Helen has always been drawn to her father's backyard shed – a male domain, a place for men's business. Yet, for Fuller, the shed evokes memories, and the process of investigating it is at once objective and subjective.
Fuller has long been associated with collage, assemblage and found objects, to which she has attached herself as a way of defining her sense of geography and history. Like the contents of the shed – her work is a layering of materials and ideas – of ambiguities and diverse meanings.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Catalogue essay by Ruth Fazakerley.
Although known for her established practice as a ceramicist, Angela Valamanesh has in recent years extended her skilful management of objects through a wider vocabulary of materials, expressed in the form of installation works.
These are constructed through an intuitive gathering of elements, in which a narrative is suggested more as something "felt" than illustrated. The empty or negative physical spaces of the installation are as important as the objects themselves to this felt narrative, contributing dynamic tension to the overall statement. Valamanesh also is a great fan of fiction writing – especially the works of Emily Dickenson and Colette whose writings evoke feelings of parting and emptiness.
Angela Valamanesh completed a Diploma in Design (Ceramics) in 1977 and a Master of Visual Arts at the University of South Australia.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Catalogue essay by James Moss.
The Velvet Target is the title of a paperback book, found by Antony Hamilton in an abandoned caravan at an old kangaroo shooting-ground at Koonalda. Irony and poetry emerge when this title is linked to the artist's latest installation – a sparse and haunting work which evidences a kangaroo shoot, incorporating an adolescent, female white fox and a shaft of light.
The sense of reality in Hamilton's "found" objects is always intensified by their rich symbolic meaning, when gathered together. Here, Hamilton creates a nocturnal environment that is simultaneously vast and enclosed.
Hamilton moved from Victoria to South Australia in the 1970's. He has shown installation work at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
A University of South Australia Art Museum exhibition. Catalogue essay by Christopher Chapman.
