2007
Blue Jay Way
Sue Pedley
3 March 2007 - 24 June 2007
Blue Jay Way, by Sydney artist Sue Pedley, creates a relationship between Heide Museum of Modern Art and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, located in New South Wales. Photographic cyanotypes and a trail of site-specific outdoor sculptures reinterpret the sounds heard in the gardens at both Heide and Penrith and, in Pedley’s words, ‘capture the spirit of the sixties: the Beatles, bird songs, concrete poetry, the era of plastic multiples, revolution and change.’
This project has been assisted by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Demeter's garden
Lauren Berkowitz
3 March 2007 - 24 June 2007
Melbourne artist Lauren Berkowitz has recently completed the permanent outdoor work Karakarook’s garden (2005–06) sited near Heide I. A geometric formation of nineteen Australian indigenous plants, Karakarook’s garden acknowledges Wurrundjeri understanding of local botany and complements John and Sunday Reed’s European-inspired kitchen gardens.
While planting this garden over a two-year period, Berkowitz collected indigenous native and exotic plant materials from Heide’s grounds for a new indoor work, Demeter’s garden (2006), which draws its inspiration from modernist abstract painting. A field of sensual floral abundance, Demeter’s garden also evokes narratives of the harvest and the power of the seasons, joining with Karakarook’s garden in acknowledging the importance of regeneration for a fertile landscape.
Never is forever
Sharon Goodwin
3 March 2007 - 17 June 2007
New works extend Sharon Goodwin’s drawing practice, as she populates the Project Gallery with a hybrid iconography that merges art-historical and popular graphic illustrations. Goodwin’s condensations of genres and narratives offer detailed icons for the viewer to unravel.Perfect for every occasion
Photography today
17 March 2007 - 1 July 2007
Surrounding us in the mass media and advertising, let alone the visual arts, photography incessantly informs our sense of who we are. Digital technologies have facilitated the creation of an immeasurable abundance of images, along with the establishment of corporatised archives that act as repositories of visual information and history. Perfect for every occasion: photography today surveys new practice in Australian photography in the twenty-first century.
The Goddess grins
Albert Tucker and the female image
26 May 2007 - 28 October 2007
The Goddess grins explores Albert Tucker’s complex and varied representations of women over a period of seven decades. Tucker used the female image as an allegory of immorality and of the human condition as it is dehumanised under pressure. This exhibition shows how Tucker empowered women as valued and dynamic individuals in his portraits, photographs and in his Images of Modern Evil as a social force within the geographic space of the city.How Excellently We Did-diddilly-do-do Do It
Justine Khamara
23 June 2007 - 11 November 2007
Justine Khamara uses the medium of photography as the basis for her unique three-dimensional collages. Thousands of photographic details are painstakingly cut out by hand and reassembled to create new freestanding forms that combine elements of Eastern religious symbolism, popular culture and Western art history in both unsettling and comical ways.
An Arrangement to Span the Distance Between
Jennie Lang and Geoff Robinson
30 June 2007 - 21 October 2007
Melbourne artists Jennie Lang and Geoff Robinson present a collaborative installation that engages with the architecture of the modernist building, Heide II. An arrangement of materials, including rope, timber and limestone, traverses the building’s central space and extends into the natural environment, forming an abstract structure referencing the systems of temporary bridge design.Savage Luxury
Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939
14 July 2007 - 4 November 2007
Savage Luxury: Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939 presents a lavish insight into early modernist interior design originating in Melbourne during the 1930s. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of modern interiors and furnishings designed and commissioned in Australia prior to World War II, positioning Melbourne at the forefront of interior design at this time.COMBINE
Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley, Melinda Harper
27 October 2007 - 24 February 2008
The exhibition title COMBINE derives from American artist Robert Rauschenberg's use of this term to describe his radical assemblages of painted images, found objects and other artists’ works in the 1950s. This concept provided the loose generative framework for Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and Melinda Harper’s self-curated project in Heide II, the modernist house designed in 1963–64 by David McGlashan of McGlashan and Everist.Those who made and those who saw
Portraits of the Heide circle
3 November 2007 - 15 June 2008
With the advent of modernism the appearance and traditions of the portrait underwent a transformation. Strict representation was rejected by the avant-garde and likenesses came to be considered more holistically; ideas and emotions, form and colour could be as important as the identifying characteristics of the protagonist.
This exhibition comprises over fifty portraits and self-portraits by and of the artists and associates of the Heide circle during the development of modernism in Australia. It also considers the wider context of the main participants in this group, and the role played by other gathering places and creative hubs such as the Boyd’s Murrumbeena Pottery and the Kismet Library in Fitzroy.
Power & beauty
Indigenous art now
17 November 2007 - 10 March 2008
Power and beauty are concepts that resonate through the work of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in all areas of Australia today. Indigenous art is strong in country and law: it is concerned with the politics of identity and place, and the beauty of truth.
The works in Power and beauty, Indigenous art now beat with the pulse of today and respond to the current pressures of living in Australia: from Cairns to Warakurna, Brunswick to Brisbane. Stunning paintings and sculptures, thought-provoking installations and photographs and a challenging program of public events, including artists’ performances, offer potent ways of experiencing a diverse manifestation of cultural values, asertions of identity as well as political resistance.
