Outside the Frame: Art and the Moving Image

Perimeter Editions

Artists have been experimenting with film and pushing the boundaries of the moving image since the earliest years of the medium. Gaining momentum with the emergence of the expanded cinema movement in the 1960s, and further solidifying with video art in the 1970s, by the start of the new millennium, video art, moving image, and broader screen-based practices had become some of art’s most dominant and influential genres. Today, as we navigate the opportunities and implications of networked technologies and social media, the moving image is at the nexus of the cultural milieu – a key signpost through avant-garde practice, democratised video culture and the creative technologies pushing artistic boundaries. 

Among this rich and dynamic cultural space, two Australian institutions have stood out as central pillars of this essential art form. Since 2009, Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art – in collaboration with the Adelaide Film Festival – and Melbourne’s ACMI have driven major commissioning programs for new moving image works that have helped both redefine and further locate the medium at the core of Australian and global creative practice. This book, the first of its kind in Australia, not only provides a rich reference and documentation of these crucial moving image commissions, but also provides a series of historical and newly commissioned critical and discursive reflections on both the artistic outputs and the role and history of commissioning practice. Outside the Frame: Art and the Moving Image is a guide to creativity, the artworks, and the institutional armature that underpins the moving image. 

Featuring artworks by Lynette Wallworth, Warwick Thornton, Shaun Gladwell, Daniel Crooks, Angelica Mesiti, David Rosetzky, Hossein Valamanesh, Trent Parke and Narelle Autio, Molly Reynolds and Rolf de Heer, Soda Jerk, Zanny Begg, Amos Gebhardt, John Harvey, Jason Phu, Gabriella Hirst, Madison Bycroft, Reko Rennie, and Amrita Hepi; new contextual essays by Kate Warren and Lauren Carroll Harris; a conversation between Anna Zagala, Amos Gebhardt and Jason Phu; and new and republished historical texts by Catherine Wilson, Anna Zagala, Sarah Tutton, Erica Green, Ulanda Blair, Emma McCrae, Fiona Trigg, Hamid Severi, Gideon Haigh, Robert McFarlane, Jessie Scott, Isobel Parker Philip, Adolfo Aranjuez, Jenna Rain Warwick, Chelsey O’Brien, Shelley McSpedden, Kathryn Weir, McKenzie Wark, and Kate ten Buuren.         

384 pages, 28 x 20 cm, OTA-bound softcover, Perimeter Editions x Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia x Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

$69.00

Available for purchase through Perimeter Books

Helen Fuller

Wakefield Press

Tarntanya/Adelaide artist Helen Fuller is curious, inventive and willing to follow her compulsion to make, whatever the material. Over a long and extensive career, she has established a multidisciplinary practice encompassing a rich variety of painting, sculpture, installation and, in recent years, ceramics.

Driven by intuition and materiality, she approaches ceramics in a manner she likens to painting, concerned with the characteristics of form rather than the function of the vessel. Unfailingly experimental, she describes her instinct as 'off-road'.

Her art is influenced by her travels in Australia, Europe, Asia, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, but is also intensely personal to her own family history and life. In Helen Fuller, the first major publication devoted entirely to Fuller's work, the authors explore aspects of her fifty years of practice and a life of art.

136 pages, 28 x 20 cm, Ross Wolfe, Sasha Grbich, Glenn Barkley, Helen Fuller.

$54.95

Available for purchase through Wakefield Press

The Samstag Legacy: An Artist's Bequest

Samstag Museum of Art

The American artist Gordon Samstag famously made one of the great cultural bequests benefitting the arts in this country, enabling Australian visual artists to develop their skills and abilities internationally – through the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships. Proudly published by the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for the University of South Australia’s 25th birthday celebrations – and the 25th anniversary of the Samstag Scholarships – this groundbreaking book charts the lives and careers of Anne and Gordon Samstag, and their sixteen years of living and working in Australia and eventual return to America. Who were the enigmatic Samstags? Intensely private, each boasting rich ancestral family trees, philanthropy was in their blood. This is their story. 

When Anne and Gordon Samstag migrated to Australia in 1961, they left few clues as to their reasons or motivations. In fact, although both had enjoyed early artistic success in America, their backgrounds and achievements remained unknown to new friends and colleagues alike; in Australia, they became people of mystery. Gordon soon began teaching at the South Australian School of Art, and after a decade in Adelaide the Samstags moved to tropical Cairns, in Queensland, eventually returning to America in 1977. The Samstags had loved their time in Australia, and they reciprocated with a significant, in-perpetuity benefaction to Australia’s artists; the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, established in 1991. After 25 years, Anne and Gordon’s historic gift still ranks as one of the very great bequests to visual arts education in Australia.

392 pages, hardback, richly illustrated with over 190 images, Editor Ross Wolfe, Essays by Lea Rosson DeLong and Ross Wolfe.

$70.00

Available for purchase through Samstag Museum of Art