At the end of the month the Canberra Art Biennial will open to the public. Launching 27 September at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), located lakeside, the Biennial will then run across multiple indoor and outdoor venues in the capital until 26 October.
Overall the Biennial (formerly known as contour556) presents contemporary mixed media artworks in the designed landscape of Canberra. You can visit their website for more information, or head over to the social media where they post regular content about individual projects, artists and experiences.
The CCAS show which opens the festival proper is titled ‘witness, collector, archivist, narrator’ and is curated by Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan Van Hek, of sydenham international. The exhibition will feature artworks by Tiyan Baker, Emma Buswell, Louise Curham with Erik Griswold, Hannah de Feyter, Lewis Doherty, Melissa Howe, Alex Kershaw, MP Hopkins and Claire Peake. What’s on view revolves around the action of documenting, the artists ‘consider the impulse to document with a varied focus and approach – capturing, recording, collecting, narrating, archiving, witnessing, following, tracing.’
The Mixing Room Gallery is host to a group exhibition with a focus on glass called Pop Songs in the Desert, located at Thor’s Hammer in Griffith. The participating artists include Nell, Jacqueline Bradley, Kirstie Rea, Luke Chiswell and Aiden Hartshorn.
Hartshorn’s work promises to explore ‘the ongoing cultural and environmental impacts of the Industrialisation of Australia’s high country water systems.’ Chiswell also shares a creation that ‘highlights the mutual destruction impact of human actions on nature.’ Bradley presents work connected to nature with imagery of stone fruits that considers ‘replication and reproduction in human bodies and fruiting trees.’ Nell’s work asks ‘How can something be in a state of withering and blooming at the same time? How are both these things true?’ Rea experiences and records her natural surroundings, she says ‘The surface of the glass offering a reflection of what is behind me, where I have been, laid over the way forward that is seen through the glass.’
On 17 October we can look forward to an exhibition titled Cruel Optimism, curated by Christian Sirois, which will open 11am to 4pm Tuesday to Sunday at The Vault in the Dairy Road precinct, Fyshwick. The participating artists will be Tony Albert, Nathan Beard, Rat Bedlington, Gemma Brown, Jenna Lee, Hamish Wiseman, Isaac Kairouz and Shamen Suku. The organisers explain;
‘Cruel Optimism delves into the liminality of Queer realities, exploring themes of world-building, community construction, cryptic geographies, and the documentation of individual and collective histories. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of Cruel Optimism (2011), this exhibition investigates what knowledge can be produced through Queer-to-Queer dialogue and relational exchanges. It questions whether acceptance is a sufficient response to oppression or if more profound actions are needed to address systemic inequalities.’
Outside, at the Yale-Columbia Refractor ruin/Mount Stromlo Observatory, curator Oscar Capezio presents a show titled Clay Pit, open weekends only 1-6pm. The space dubbed Al Fresco is a home for seasonally programmed outdoor art exhibitions. The show will comprise sculpture, assemblage and painting by Francis Carmody, Caspar Connolly, Bill Hawkins, Yvette James, and Katie Ryan. The team asserts that ‘these artists cultivate material forms through an analysis of how the structure of the natural world influences human behaviour, spawning the creation of complex processes of adaptation, invention, and extraction. Through an exploration of the symbiotic structure of relationships between people and place, the past and the present, these artists work to reveal the tensions at play between realms of human and non-human experience, knowledge, and feeling.’
You can access a map of locations here. Some other unique places to discover art include the National Arboretum, Barton Art Box (Lisa Sammut and Mimi Kind), Such & Such, Verity Lane (Jacquie Meng), National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra Airport and more. Some artists will be presenting across multiple sites so we encourage you to explore widely.