Greetings From Australia

Greetings from Australia

Volunteer Paula Vellet has been visiting Australia and sending us her recommendations and reflections about all things women in photography.

National Gallery Victoria (NGV) Australia

Ian Potter Centre, Melbourne

Destiny Deacon

I was so pleased to see, on entering the museum’s Wurrdha Marra section (meaning Many Mobs’ in the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung language) dedicated to the work of First Nations artists, the wonderfully subversive images of the late Kuku/Erub/Mer artist and activist Destiny Deacon (1956-2024).

Destiny was a prolific artist and activist challenging ‘high art’ and the dominant culture. Her provocative body of work showcases her family and friends with her collection of ‘Koori kitsch’ playfully parodying and questioning cultural stereotypes such as the images of ‘The Wizard of Oz’.

Photos:

‘Oz games, sad, travelling, scared, slow,’ 1998
‘Over the fence, 2000’, from the ‘Sad and bad’ series, questioning access to opportunities and freedoms
‘Arrears window’, 2009, which is currently appearing as the façade of one of Melborne’s Art Trams. This work was produced by Destiny in response to overcrowded living conditions in high density city housing.
‘Smile’, 2017

In the International section of the NGV, very few women photographers are represented but one great is there – Dora Maar (1907-1997) with two fashion studies from 1936, one a dramatic surrealist image, the other an anti-fashion image of Leonor Fini lying a floor strewn with clothes.

An interesting exhibition on images of St Catherine of Alexandria features a 1988 staging by Australian photographer Rose Farrell (1949-2015) investigating the iconography of Western religious art and St Catherine was the patron saint of young women. There was also a 1929 photo of photographer Lee Miller ‘Lee Miller on a cannon’ by Man Ray, a recent acquisition by the museum but sadly none of her work.

Female photographic representation in Sydney

@mca @artgalleryofnsw

The two spaces of the Museum of Contemporary Art – the new North Building Naala Nura and the original South Building , Naala Badu – present a dramatic, large scale art experience which fuses past, present and future. In the new space, I loved the rich visual and sound work, Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When, that reimagines collective and communal rituals in relation to celestial and seasonal phenomena. This new 2024 work by Sydney video artist Angelica Mesiti (1976-) occupies seven massive screens in this fantastic space within a forest of columns; it is an exploration of reconnection to community in this time of cultural and environmental uncertainty.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/angelica-mesiti/

Above, in this incredible multilevel space, work by other international and national female artists were on show. Indian photographer Gauri Gill (1970) 2015- ‘Acts of Appearance ’ series documenting Maharashtra masks continued the community and seasonal festival theme of ‘making worlds’.

The futuristic cyberspace video work of Chinese female filmmaker and photographer Cao Fei (1978-) ‘Cao Fei: My City is Yours’ with two new commissioned works and ‘Nova’ 2019 (which was shown in London at the RA 2024 Summer Exhibition), will open on 30 November in the north building.

In the original South Building space, a tribute to the late Australian photographer Rosemary Laing (1959-2024) included the landscape 2001 series ‘groundspeed ‘ (Red Piazza) #2 created in Morton National Park on the New South Wales South Coast, as a comment on our impact on the indigenous landscape, with her artificial red carpet insinuated into the lush greenery . On show alongside this work was her 2002 series ‘bullet proof glass’ expressing her disillusionment with the failure of the referendum, the bride representative of the innocence and optimism of her earlier 1999 work, ‘flight research’.

Nearby, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the retrospective of photographer Julie Rrap (1950-) ‘Past Continuous’ occupies a prominent space and shows the arc of her performance- based work in mixed media and photography exploring her body over time, from her 1982 work ‘Disclosures: A Photographic Construct’, to today. Like other female Australian artists, she investigates the invisibility of the aging female body.