July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
The Samstag Museum of Art
By Stephanie radok
Erica Green was first appointed director of the University of South Australia Art Museum in 1990 (previous directors include Stephanie Britton and Tim Morrell). Green oversaw the gallery's move from the suburb of Underdale to the city of Adelaide in 1998 and since 2000 she has overlooked the design and construction of the new gallery, now called the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art.
The new gallery designed by John Wardle Architects + Hassell Architects in Association is the second largest public gallery in South Australia. It will open on the 11th of October and has three exhibition spaces - a 500 square metre gallery, a mezzanine gallery and a smaller project space. All the floors are beautiful polished ironbark and do not connect with the walls but stop about 10 centimetres short of them, and possess concealed data ports around their edges.
Timothy Horn, Discomedusae, 2004, synair, polyurethane rubber and light globes. Samstag Collection. University of South Australia
This lack of connect between floor and walls gives the galleries a sense of floating in air which can be interpreted as a mental space of receptivity, a good place to be when looking at art.
The Museum is the permanent home of two spectacular and large artworks, one is the specially commissioned public sculpture called Different forms of Intelligence by Fiona Hall and the other is Discomedusae by Samstag scholar Timothy Horn (above).
Hall's work, which has been made over the last eighteen months, was conceived as an integral part of the entire design of the building. It uses the brain as a symbol of intelligence and the five Platonic solids, the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, as metaphors for different types of intelligence.
Hall has intensively fabricated brain textures on three forms in clay to be cast in bronze and finished with three different patinas by mastercraftsman Paul Westra, while sculptor Tony Bishop has carved brain textures into both a wooden and a marble form.
The complete work also includes an anatomically correct brain made from glass by Hall with some assistance from glass artist Deb Jones.
He says being in a rural area without a university it is hard to attract people aged in their 20s: "When people hit about 18 they tend to go to the city and we don't see them again until they're in their mid-30s and they come back with families."
Narelle Autio, Siren VI from the series The Place in Between, 2007, from the series The Place in Between, pigment print, 85cm x 104cm. Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
The work promises to provoke both thought and wonder. Timothy Horn's extraordinary giant jellyfish chandelier inspired by the illustrations of the nineteenth century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel will hang in the entry area.
Wonderful World, the inaugural Museum exhibition, running from 11 October to 7 December, will span all three gallery spaces, and is curated by Erica Green. It features the work of Narelle Autio, Simon Carroll/Martin Friedel, Jon Cattapan, Daniel Crooks, James Darling/ Lesley Forwood, Robert MacPherson, Ningura Napurrula, Susan Norrie, Philip Wolfhagen and Anne Zahalka with a catalogue essay by David Hansen.
Many of the works in the exhibition are large, including installations by Susan Norrie and Simon Carroll. Jon Cattapan and Philip Wolfhagen have undertaken major new works for this exhibition, Wolfhagen's work is over 9 metres.
For the 2008 Adelaide Festival the gallery will show Penumbra: contemporary art from Taiwan, from 29 February to 4 April, curated by Sophie McIntyre featuring a range of new media and installation works by established and emerging contemporary artists in Taiwan.
Later in 2008, an exhibition of art by South Australian artists called Uneasy curated by Tim Morrell will be shown.
Simon Carroll, & Martin Friedel, born 1945 Wartaweil, West Germany. History of a day, 2004, 35mm film/ DVD, 4 screens, stereo sound, 20:00mins. Courtesy the artists and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
While the gallery has been closed Green has energetically deaccessioned works and the Museum collection will now focus exclusively on South Australian artists and Samstag scholarship winners.
The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art is an important link in the chain of university art museums spanning Australia.
These Museums are vital in the development and consolidation of Australian culture by supporting the achievements of artists and in curating and circulating exhibitions of both Australian and international art.
Though Australian art is international as well as being Australian, isn't it?
The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia 55 North Terrace, Adelaide opens 11 October 2007
Stephanie radok is an artist, writer, and editor based in Adelaide.
Jon Cattapan, (b.1956 Melbourne, Australia), Possible histories: stream 2007, oil on linen, 165 x 645 cm (4 panels). Courtesy: Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
