September 2018
Lure | Dena Kahan
Using museum collections as subject matter for still life painting, Dena Kahan plays with ambiguities of scale, space and reflection to undermine the clear containment of the museum case. In her exhibition, Lure, insects are drawn to these artificial replicas of the plant world. This imagery references the tradition of 17th century Dutch still life, in which plants and insects take on symbolic meanings and flowers of different seasons bloom together...
Find out more »Bloom | Lori Pensini
Lori Pensini explores her heritage and that of her family in her solo exhibition, Bloom. This body of work contains four large scale paintings which examine familial relationships and the personal and cultural connections which exist in pastoral Australia.
Find out more »October 2018
Recess | Martin King
Using William Strutt's epic Black Thursday as a starting point, Martin King has developed a new series of artworks and art objects which explore the somewhat mythical aspects of land, flora and fauna.
Find out more »Navigate | Tim Allen
Tim Allen is a painter in the landscape tradition who works from a studio in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. His painting career spans more than 20 years and he has been awarded several prestigious awards such as the Paddington Art Prize in 2017. Navigate is his first solo exhibition at Gallerysmith.
Find out more »November 2018
Minang Boodjar | Christopher Pease
In 1828, a fleet of three ships was chartered to establish a new colony at Swan River in Western Australia. The HMS Challenger set sail first, followed by the Parmelia and HMS Sulphur which launched from Spithead off Portsmouth, England in February 1829.
One of the regiment’s soldiers was Lieutenant Robert Dale (1810-1856), whose duty it was to explore the new land and document the expedition. He made extensive trips along the Canning River, throughout the York district and King George’s Sound resulting in the most ambitious attempt to depict the Australian landscape in print-making during the first half of the nineteenth century. The six paintings which are collectively titled Minang Boodjar re-examine the 19th century propaganda circulated by Dale which depicted civilised relations between settlers and the Nyoongar. By recreating sections of Dale’s familiar landscape etchings as paintings at an epic scale, Pease focuses our attention on the troubled notion of a romanticised account of colonisation.