Art Almanac May 2024

The composition of a painting or other work of art creates a path for the viewer’s eye to follow, embarking on a journey guided by the artist or our own choice of direction and experience. This issue is full of journeys. Judy Watson’s practice weaves history, tradition, and stories into multidimensional and culturally relevant works of various media: unstretched canvases, thickets of cut branches, mounds of poured salt, and pigment and paint to re-tell historical truths. Dale Frank’s swirling resin works form almost a Twilight Zone vector, pulling the viewer into a threedimensional space of expanded painting, stretched meaning, and unconfined movement. Annika Romeyn’s drawings and prints, scaled in proportion to her own body, aim to immerse viewers in experiences of place and landscape. The artist invites us to walk…

Featured artist: Dale Frank Dale Frank’s decades-long practice demonstrates a commitment to experimentation, expansion, and exploration into the potentiality of painting, alongside his wide-ranging use of materials and multidisciplinary approach. Glossy metallic pigments merge on the surface of the canvas, or Perspex bases, as unruly lines harden only to, almost in protest (and in line with Frank’s expansion of medium), continuously move. Colour and texture coalesce in equilibrium and, in this calming balance, we step inside such works as Art à la mode was the culture, 2012, which (a detail of) graces our cover, to continue our own journeys – to stretch the path as far as it will go, or to hit a “dead end”. Frank allows us to choose. While Art à la mode was the culture is…

Melbourne Design Week From 23 May to 2 June, Melbourne Design Week presents eleven days of 300+ innovative exhibitions, installation displays, symposiums, talks, and workshops throughout metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. Exploring the theme of ‘Design the world you want’, the 2024 program brings into focus the use of energy, ethics and ecology to encourage positive change, reimagine existing systems and offer innovative design solutions to complex global challenges. Highlights include the Melbourne Art Book Fair, a marketplace of art books, publishing and design featuring more than 100 stallholders; the Melbourne Design Week Film Festival, presenting a series of films that explore the impact of architecture and design through the moving image and its power to affect change, innovate and shape community, cities and the environment; and galleries and design…

Formist Editions There are undoubtedly Sydneysiders who fantasise that Roslyn and Tony Oxley are Sin City’s match for the Melbourne Reeds – Sunday and John. “Sense and sensibility,” as artist John Wolseley suggests in the mighty tome, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery: The First 40 Years: “She the exuberant aesthetic romantic, and Tony the quiet pragmatist,” smilingly standing back and observing proceedings. But this book makes it quite clear just how engaged Tony, the former Bushells Tea family company director and MBA, is in the business. And, of course, is is definitely the word emerging from a title that insists it’s only “The First 40 years”. Ros too had a pre-gallery life – twenty years as an international design practitioner – before the gallery idea emerged from discussions with Paul Taylor at…

“. . . the ability to stand out naked.” “At the time of leaving the studio, being exhibited, some works take on the immediate presence of a shower, the ability to stand out naked,” Dale Frank tells me about Growers and Showers, “appearing more significant than others. While other works that may appear on the first showing as lesser works, in the course of time, and later viewings, take on a strength from within, to grow greater in significance.” A survey of works created across a decade (between 2012 and 2022, ostensibly) and shown across two floors, this exhibition presents more than forty large-scale paintings, sculptures and installations and includes nine never-before-exhibited works. “The nine previously unseen works are several large canvas tinted varnish paintings from 2012 and 2013,” the…

“tomorrow the tree grows stronger” mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri – the title of Judy Watson’s survey show is registered in lowercase, like most of her titles, drawn from over four decades of practice. This is one stylistic convention, an underlying trope, that acts as conduit for the thematic depths Watson’s work invites us to fathom. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a poem by the artist’s son, Otis Carmichael, in the Waanyi language of Watson’s matrilineal family. The intentionality and often brisk phrases that name these works all carry weight. Word is given a running prominence within mudunama, with a series of poetic readings accompanying the opening weekend. Language, spoken and written, is one of the conceptual pillars of Watson’s practice. Others might include environment, water, family and gesture. It…