ANNE WALLACE: STRANGE WAYS
Friday 16 October — Saturday 28 November

Strange Ways is the first major survey exhibition of Samstag Scholar Anne Wallace, and includes works from the early 1990s through to the current day. Born and raised in Brisbane in the 1970s and now based in Melbourne, Wallace’s highly accomplished figurative paintings are as much about the textual as the pictorial.

Wallace has an uncanny ability to tap into shared psyches, drawing upon the language of pop culture to combine the familiar with the unfamiliar. The moments conjured capture a tension between the real and the imagined; there is sexual and social confusion, vulnerability and violence, alienation and loneliness, feelings of the abject, and fantasies of power and revenge.

Spanning three decades and bringing together works from public and private collections, this is the most comprehensive survey of Wallace’s practice to date.

Strange Ways is a QUT Art Museum touring exhibition, accompanied by a major publication featuring new essays by Gillian Brown, Curator at Samstag, Francis Plagne and Vanessa Van Ooyen.

Image: Anne WALLACE, Writer’s Block, 2000, oil on canvas, 111.5 x 136.5cm, University of South Australia Art Collection.

AMOS GEBHARDT: SMALL ACTS OF RESISTANCE
Friday 16 October — Saturday 28 November

Small acts of resistance is a new three-channel moving image work by artist and filmmaker Amos Gebhardt.

Against a backdrop of social and ecological precarity, we witness kinship and community bringing about small but vital acts of resistance.

Evoking the grandeur of the Renaissance triptych, Small acts of resistance unfolds across three screens – from the migration of the crabs of Christmas Island to the communal lives of urban flying foxes, from the ballroom collective House of Slé to a chosen family surrounding a newborn with tenderness and love. Each act, each gesture, underscores the importance of interconnectivity.

A trained filmmaker with experience in cinematography, Gebhardt brings together portraiture, dance and song to celebrate an existence outside of normativity.

Small acts of resistance was created through the South Australian Film Corporation and South Australian Living Artists Festival’s inaugural Artist in Residence commission, and is presented as part of the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Small acts of resistance is accompanied by a digital catalogue featuring essays by Isobel Parker Philip, Senior Curator of Australian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Adolfo Aranjuez, writer, editor and performer.

Image: Amos GEBHARDT, Family portrait (detail), archival inkjet pigment print, from the series Small acts of resistance, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

KIRSTEN COELHO: ITHACA
Friday 16 October — Saturday 28 November

Kirsten Coelho has long been fascinated by The Odyssey. Dated 900-700 BC and attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic details Odysseus’s ten-year journey home to the island of Ithaca following the events of the Trojan War. For Coelho, when Odysseus’s eventual return is marked by the discovery that Ithaca is not as he remembered it, the tale unfolds as an exploration of home as an elusive concept, abstracted by time and the inevitability of change.

Born in Copenhagen, Coelho moved to North America as a child, before immigrating to Australia with her family. Revisiting her previous countries of residence as an adult proved the relatability of Odysseus’s experience.

Drawing on the physicality of Grecian ceramics, Coelho reflects on Odysseus’s journey through a series of serene, graceful ceramic vessels of soft white porcelain.

Coelho’s ideas around home run in parallel to her investigation of the ruin. As a ceramicist, Coelho is all too aware of the lifespan of material culture, impacted the passage of time and the influences of its environment. Inspired by Grecian and Roman artefacts and architectural ruins (columns, statues and plinths) she deploys the ruin as metaphor for the inevitability — and the possibilities — of change.

Kirsten Coelho is a University of South Australia alumna and the feature artist of the 2020 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival. Published this year, the Kirsten Coelho SALA Monograph by Wendy Walker is available for purchase at our front desk.

Ithaca is accompanied by a digital catalogue featuring an essay by Joanna Kitto, Associate Curator at Samstag.

Image: Kirsten COELHO, Ithaca, 2019, porcelain matte glaze. Photo: Grant Hancock. Courtesy the artist, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.