Tag: art

Reflection and Respite: The Big Anxiety Festival Exhibition at Fisher Library

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Detail from Reflection and Respite by Ross Richardson

One of the simplest and most immediately accessible ways to lift your mood is a walk in the countryside or along the beach. Can spending time in front of a piece of art have a similar effect?

Influenced by recent research work on biophilia and ecopsychology, artists Emma and Ross propose that observing, drawing and even colouring in natural forms can help to reduce blood pressure, improve immune responses, and help alleviate anxiety. Art and nature in this sense combine to provide an antidote, and looking at images of nature can enhance a calm meditation. The concepts of mandalas, symmetry and balance are explored in the context of compositions which promote reflection and respite from the busyness of everyday life. 

Reflection and Respite exhibition, Fisher Library by Dr Emma Robertson and Ross Richardson

This exhibition in glass vitrines is on three levels of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, and the installation is also inspired by the setting of the Library, and the conventions of scientific illustration. Quotations from books relating to anxiety are integrated into the displays.

Supported by Scientia Education Fellowship, UNSW and The Fisher Library, The University of Sydney.

Detail from Reflection and Respite exhibition, Fisher Library by Dr Emma Robertson and Ross Richardson

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Reflection and Respite is part of the Big Anxiety Fesitival, Australia’s largest mental health festival.

The Big Anxiety brings together artists, scientists and communities to question and re-imagine the state of mental health in the 21st century.

A radically new kind of international arts festival, in which every project is an open conversation, designed to promote curiosity, awareness and action, The Big Anxiety presents events across Sydney, tackling the major anxieties of our times, as well as the stresses and strains of everyday life.

Whether through hi-tech interactive environments or one-on-one dialogues, our goal is to create the rich engagements we need for our collective mental health.

The Big Anxiety is an initiative of UNSW Sydney in association with the Black Dog Institute and partners in the cultural, education and health sectors.

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Artist Biography

Dr Emma Robertson is an award winning artist, whose work is in seven public collections in four countries. The Hospital Trust for Scotland purchased two works for their permanent collection, which were commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council for the exhibition Wordworks. Emma’s work has been competitively selected for a public art commission for a Hospice, for the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, the JADA, and four International Biennials of Drawing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Scientia Education Fellow / Associate Professor at UNSW, and a previous Artist in Residence at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. Her expertise in education relating to entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity at University and Executive Education levels has seen her win three prestigious teaching awards. Her PhD at The University of Sydney explored biophilia, ecopsychology, and artistic, nature-based antidotes to anxiety.

Ross Richardson studies illustration at the University of Edinburgh, and he is inspired by the natural environment, people, patterns, and landscape. His work has been competitively selected three times for the Mosman Youth Art Prize. He has received Highly Commended notifications for the Camden Art Prize, the Nan Manefield Youth Writer’s Award, and the Young Archies. Ross has also been selected for the Hunters Hill Art Exhibition, the Waverley Youth Art Prize, the Royal Art Society of NSW Youth Artist Prize, and the Hornsby Art Prize. In 2015 he won First Place in the Wollongong University Design Award for NSW. His work in this exhibition features watercolours, and also polymer clay three dimensional forms.

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Visit Reflection and Respite, 27 September – 31 October 2019 at Fisher Library levels 2, 3 & 4.

Provocations: Avant-Garde Art in China in the 1980s

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Cover image: Plate 18: Zhang Peili X? Series: No. 4 1987 Oil on Canvas; 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in. (80 x 100 cm); private collection

An exhibition curated by Bingqing Wei and Minerva Inwald

Plate 18: Zhang Peili X? Series, 1986. Oil on Canvas; 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in. (80 x 100 cm); private collection From Inside/out : new Chinese art / edited by Gao Minglu ; with essays by Norman Bryson ... [et al.].

Where: Exhibition Space, Level 2, Fisher Library

When: 31 August 2017- 15 July 2018.

or check out the Virtual Exhibition:

https://library.sydney.edu.au/collections/east-asian/provocations/index.html

The 1980s was a period of dramatic political, cultural, and economic change in the People’s Republic of China. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), socialist ideology penetrated every facet of China’s social and cultural realms. After the Cultural Revolution concluded, the Chinese Communist Party shifted towards a policy of “opening and reform.” China’s cultural authorities loosened their control over the artistic sphere, ushering in a period of discussion, debate, and artistic experimentation. For thirty years, official cultural policy had demanded that artistic production “serve the masses” and “serve politics.” In the liberal atmosphere of the mid-1980s, a new generation of path-breaking artists emerged across China, forming “avant-garde” groups collectively known as the ’85 New Wave movement. Concerned with the future of China’s artistic culture, ’85 New Wave artists critically engaged with Western artistic and philosophical concepts and experimented with artistic form, expanding and diversifying the artistic field. Supported by a coterie of art critics, theorists, and curators, these avant-garde artists held provocative exhibitions and published iconoclastic manifestoes. In 1989, the government’s violent crackdown on student protestors brought a decisive end to this period of avant-garde exploration, extinguishing the optimistic spirit of avant-gardism that characterised the 1980s.

This exhibition introduces materials relating to China’s avant-garde held in the University of Sydney Library collections, including the East Asian Collection and the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library. Focusing on important Chinese fine art periodicals donated to the University of Sydney by Professor John Clark, this exhibition explores the artworks, exhibitions, and ideas that animated the Chinese art world of the 1980s. Supplementing these primary sources with important art historical texts, this exhibition seeks to demonstrate how materials in University of Sydney Library collections can be used to explore this dynamic period of art history.

 

Exhibition: ‘Objects in the Mirror’

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Come and check out the final 2016 installment of our Ex Libris Fisherarium Series featuring students from the Sydney College of the Arts curated by Associate Professor Michael Goldberg.

When: 20 June – 31 December 2016

Where: Fisher Library F03; Levels 2,3, and 4

This exhibition features Alex GAWRONSKI and Jelena TELECKI. ExLibris Fisherarium June 2016: Alex Gawronski setting up the exhibitionIt consists of a series of 10 book titles removed from their original contexts. Each title was chosen for its uncanny or humorous connotations once removed from its wider context. Considered collectively, these titles suggest a type of quasi-Dadaist poetry whose combined effect hints at alternative critical, playful and/or possibly even pataphysical, readings.

Graphically the original layout of each book title has been retained although now each has been rendered in watercolour as a ‘painting’. These works further reference the importance of text in contemporary art and artists as diverse as Ed Ruscha and Marcel Broodthaers. Accompanying these text works are figurative paintings by Jelena Telecki. These all respond to the book titles. Together the appropriated titles and their figurative interpretations, establish an open dialogue of fairly infinite suggestability.

‘Objects in the Mirror…’ (may be closer than they appear – as the warning goes) speaks of how texts and images continually interpolate one another while remaining fundamentally differentiated. The juxtaposition of text and image in this instance may be considered a type of improvisation that draws out the latent possibilities concealed behind the most ordinary words and the words that underlie the most stubbornly elusive representations.

New exhibition: ZEEN by Leigh Rigozzi

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This exhibition in Fisher Library is the next in the ongoing series of art projects Ex Libris Fisherarium curated by Associate Professor Michael Goldberg. The projects comprising work by staff, alumni and associates of Sydney College of the Arts are themed around the idea of ‘the book’ in all its historical and contemporary manifestations. Read more >

 

 

Exhibition: Ex Libris Fisherarium art series

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Data RetentionEx Libris Fisherarium is an ongoing series of art projects curated by Associate Professor Michael Goldberg. The projects comprising work by staff, alumni and associates of Sydney College of the Arts are themed around the idea of ‘the book’ in all its historical and contemporary manifestations.

Project: Data Retention by Gianni Wise

Artist’s Statement
With the proliferation of data networks, the human mind always find ways to ‘wire-up’ new connections between itself, objects, ideas, events and the world. I use wires and books as a form of ready-made art that work as props for memory. Objects external to the mind can trigger memory and make connections. I am interested in this interplay between mind and external world. When Umberto Ecco claimed in the Name of The Rose (1988): “Wanting connections, we found connections always, everywhere, and between everything” he refers to a world ‘exploding’ in a whirling network of interrelationships where everything (appears to) point to everything else, everything explains everything else.

Curator’s Statement
Gianni Wise’s installation has its menacing aspects. The title, ‘Data Retention’, might well refer to current government policies regarding the retention of metadata – the harvesting from telecommunications networks of personal information by law enforcement agencies – ostensibly to protect the public from acts of terrorism. Indeed, the installation itself displays a number of sinister ‘packages’. Perhaps they hold data. But they also disturbingly resemble IEDs (or ‘improvised explosive devices’). The ‘connections’ Wise refers to carry the potential to penetrate deep into our personal lives, challenging privacy and potentially violating fundamental rights. In this sense, the installation reflects on the threat of data retention exposing our personal lives ‘like an open book’. Wise’s use of ambiguously wired devices may equally suggest the mind’s desire to invent ‘paranoid’ connections where there are none.

Dates: 23 February to 26 March 2015
Where: Levels 2, 3 and 4 exhibition cabinets, Fisher Library North
Cost: FREE and open daily to the public
Times: Opening times vary, please check the website

For details of past and current projects, connect with Ex Libris Fisherarium on Facebook.