Category Archives: Visual Arts

Research at Monash University

Doing research for a colleague

We had a fun day today doing some research. We headed across Melbourne to Monash University Clayton Campus to view a document for a colleague. This is what we like doing now that we are in Melbourne — doing research favours for colleagues.

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Oceania: From Melbourne to Papeete

Revisiting  a 2019 entry to an exhibition catalogue

This piece was a difficult piece to write. The requirement was to survey 19th century photography across the Pacific in a few hundred words. Many hours were spent reducing the entry and making decisions on what to leave out — reluctantly!   If I ever find the time I may revisit this and make it a much longer piece with all the extras inserted back in. Wishful thinking maybe? Here’s the original piece.

Rod McNicol, The Roses 2024

On Our Collections

When we moved, we dispersed some of our collections and said to ourselves that we should not buy any more. Then we saw this wonderful new work by Rod McNicol.

A previous notice for this was posted on Facebook — but their algorithm removed it.  We have a theory.   Click here for the original piece on our website

Hélène Hoppenot

Following my research, collection acquisitions and exhibition on Southeast Asian photography while at the National Gallery of Australia, in 2014 I wrote a piece about Hélène Hoppenot and 1930s women modernist photographers in Southeast Asia. Till now this essay has been unpublished. It is now online — click here — more or less unchanged from the 2014 version with a few notes and links added.

 

Parting With Your Art — Women:s Art Register

A Guide for Australian Artists

I have uploaded a page about the Women:s Art Register and their very handy publication Leaving Your Legacy: A Guide for Australian Artists.

The guide is a comprehensive starting point — and the organisation is definitely worth supporting. Click here.

camera chic

East West Chic

In 2017  The Asia Art Society of Australia (TAASA) hosted a seminar of East West Chic.
I presented a talk on Camera Chic based on a collection we had put together – with fun pictures from  Asian studio portraiture. The collection highlighted the fusion of East and West evident in dress, accessories, and studio backdrops. Click here for more

Make sure you see the link to the powerpoint slides with loads of photographs to enjoy.

National Gallery Singapore

CHARTING THOUGHTS: ESSAYS ON ART IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

A new research book has been published by the National Gallery of Singapore. It contains essays on Southeast Asian art by 25 scholars.

I was given the honour by the NGS of being one the contributing scholars.

The book is available from the NGS shop and through their website — click here.

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AMBER and Cartier-Bresson

c7b1f2d401a21cb4c9dfc7e772b823d4_186d0bf534faee4cd2e5fa2ee976ba5c661x981_quality99_o_19oqhuq0rgfpbvq1pur13no5qmaA great and arguably under-celebrated social documentary collection in the UK is having a major retrospective in its home city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England. Forever Amber, celebrating the work of the Amber Film and Photography Collective, opens at the city’s Laing Art Gallery today (27 June-19 September).

Click on image for the notice or click here for the gallery site

New NGA Senior Curator of Photography

Shaune Lakin, The New NGA Senior Curator of Photography

John Gollings

At the end of an exhibition seminar in August at the Monash Gallery of Art, as the NGA Senior Curator of Photography who was about to finish in that role, I handed on the baton and all the challenges to my replacement, the new NGA Senior Curator of Photography (from October), Shaune Lakin (previously The MGA Director).

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