Three different exhibitions, all with at least some nice pieces to recommend them, although the last (on the top floor) was definitely the highlight.
"Luminous World" comprises contemporary works from the Wesfarmers collection, themed around light. One room is mostly black and white and plays more on the theme of shadow (including a couple of Bill Hensons - breathtaking as always - the one below untitled 2009-10), while the other is more obviously 'luminous' and colour-lit.
"Weird Melancholy" stages the Australian bush as haunted house and presents its pieces through Gothic lenses - the uncanny, the repressed (Aboriginal Australians), the haunted land. The reading isn't too forced, but not that many of the works (mostly paintings) especially caught at me; one exception, which I liked a lot, was Boyd's "Spring Landscape" (1959).
And "Nature/Revelation", concerned with enlivening a sense of the profundity of nature, frequently via the sublime, in the context of concerns about anthropogenic climate change. Several striking works here.
Berndnaut Smilde's interior photographs of clouds that he generated himself ("Nimbus II", 2012):
The full wall, life size charcoal-drawn sperm whale of Jonathan Delafield Cook (it even casts a shadow) - 2013:
And several luminously beautiful Ansel Adams photos (eg "Mt McKinley and Wonder Lake", 1947):
(w/ Derrick)
"Luminous World" comprises contemporary works from the Wesfarmers collection, themed around light. One room is mostly black and white and plays more on the theme of shadow (including a couple of Bill Hensons - breathtaking as always - the one below untitled 2009-10), while the other is more obviously 'luminous' and colour-lit.
"Weird Melancholy" stages the Australian bush as haunted house and presents its pieces through Gothic lenses - the uncanny, the repressed (Aboriginal Australians), the haunted land. The reading isn't too forced, but not that many of the works (mostly paintings) especially caught at me; one exception, which I liked a lot, was Boyd's "Spring Landscape" (1959).
And "Nature/Revelation", concerned with enlivening a sense of the profundity of nature, frequently via the sublime, in the context of concerns about anthropogenic climate change. Several striking works here.
Berndnaut Smilde's interior photographs of clouds that he generated himself ("Nimbus II", 2012):
The full wall, life size charcoal-drawn sperm whale of Jonathan Delafield Cook (it even casts a shadow) - 2013:
And several luminously beautiful Ansel Adams photos (eg "Mt McKinley and Wonder Lake", 1947):
(w/ Derrick)
