Posts tagged Visual Arts Reviews
RAW: SALA – Sudhira Shah – SSStudio – Rundle St, Kent Town – 4K
Aug 16th
Sudhira Shah is a photo journalist with a specialty, when confronted with set pieces, for family portraits. She has been based in Adelaide for around 12 months and her first Adelaide, seven piece, exhibition heralded the opening of her SSStudio in Rundle Street, Kent Town.
It has to be said family portraiture is hardly new, the Gainsborough Studios of this world have thrived on it for decades, but Shah brings a life and enjoyment to her finished works that leap from the paper, images of spontaneity that make you want to be like those featured.
Using either a (mostly) white washed background and floor or the same in black, families across generations are brought together to celebrate their existences as both humans and as families. This exhibition goes a step further by highlighting not only the cross generational aspects but also cross cultural combinations that also just happen to finish up in Adelaide. It speaks to that most unheralded of our great success stories of racial integration.
Two images stand out. In close-up, one eyed relief, Roshni and Shyam are a couple of an arranged wedding and who have come to Adelaide from the hilly slopes of Nepal. Fifi and daughters Tislisha and Phila are from the African Xhosa tribe, the same as Nelson Mandella. Both images ooze of life and their interconnection and seeming contentment with their lot in Australia. They are part of the pot pouri of life that Shah is able to capture brilliantly drawing on her own inter-cultural and travelling experiences.
Kryztoff Rating 4K
Group Shot at Opening. artist 3rd from right.
RAW: Waterhouse Nat History Art Prize – SA Museum Till 5th Sept – 4K
Aug 9th
The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize commemorates the SA Museum’s first curator, Frederick George Waterhouse and this is its eighth year and already it has become Australia’s richest prize awarded for natural history or wildlife art.
There are three categories, paintings, works on paper and sculpture and objects, with a Youth competition also included.
What strikes one immediately upon entering is the great variety of the works and approaches, even within each category. None could accuse the 104 finalists (chosen from 684 entries) of attempting to pander to some preconceived notion of what the judges or even the viewing and buying public might be after. (This may stand as a contrast to competitions such as the Archibald Portrait Prize.)
This year’s overall winner is Nikki Main’s Flood Stones which appears as shiny mid-sized mineral infused rocks but is in fact blown glass with silt and powders to give a sense of silt, sediment and running water in order to celebrate the flood phase of the hydrological cycle. Some works are monuments to wild life such as Indiana James’ Restraint – Wedge Tailed Eagle, others far more political such as the Youth Prize winner, Tessa McDonnell’s Owl In Victorian Bell Jar and Terry Jackson’s Not So Different, a pencil sketch of hand that is part human and part primate.
With a purpose of celebrating the intricate and complex world of global biodiversity as well as encouraging excellence in natural history art, the Waterhouse 2010 competition is a success on all fronts.
Kryztoff Rating – 4K