Adelaide Art Guide:
What’s on in June

Flowers: Passion. Pain. Nation.
David Roche Foundation
9 June – 8 August

The David Roche Foundation has reopened this month extending the run of Flowers: Passion. Pain. Nation, an exhibition of western floral art which examines life through religion, marriage, death, love and eroticism. The exhibition includes works from the David Roche collection along with works on loan from the Art Gallery of South Australia, Carrick Hill, The Cedars and private collections.

From the late Renaissance through to contemporary Australian art flowers have featured as a universal symbol of beauty as well as comfort, love and affection. The selection of works included in the exhibition question traditional associations between flowers and femininity, physical beauty and moral purity. The earliest work in the exhibition, dating back to c1580, is the Coronation of the Virgin, by Italian Mannerist master, Bartolomeo Passerotti. The painting includes a plethora of roses signifying the Virgin Mary and her purity. Also featured are works by Dutch still life artists, Australian Modernists such as Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and contemporary artists including Michael Zavros, Christian Thompson, Del Kathryn Barton, Robyn Stacey and Ah Xian.

On elegance while sleeping
Adelaide Central School of Art
Until 24 July

The gallery at the Adelaide Central School of Art also reopened this month with the group exhibition, On elegance while sleeping, featuring work by Sundari Carmody, Honor Freeman, Sasha Grbich, and Kynan Tan. The exhibition highlights the use of sleep as a material with the artists ideas such as the links between biological and cosmological rhythms, the depths of unconscious knowledge and the twenty-first century tendency to quantify and commodify sleep.

The exhibition consists of a range of media including sculpture, video, scent, and light. For instance, Tan presents sculptures created using data collected from sleeping brain activity that is converted into 3D meshes, rendered using computer software and then printed. The neon work by Carmody reflects sleep recordings taken on the nights of the spring and autumn equinox highlighting her interest in how astronomical events can affect our daily patterns. Freeman’s beautiful delicate porcelain works represent the domestic realm and the ordinariness of everyday objects and a number of works by Grbich are included, exploring her interest in sleep, from 2015 to the present.

Focus
GAGPROJECTS
Until 28 June

GAGPROJECTS continues its programme of group exhibitions which it has embarked on since the COVID-19 restrictions. Its latest offering Focus features two established artists Paul Hoban (painter) and Mark Kimber (photographer) alongside Truc Truong and Henry Jock-Walker who are showing for the first time at GAGPROJECTS.

Also on display are a selection of works from the LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 project, which was developed during lockdown as a means for people to engage with art from the comfort of their own home. It has been very successful and works from the project by Peter Atkins, Joseph Häxan, Peter Lind, Ian North, Deborah Paauwe and Angela Valamanesh will be on display bringing the virtual into the physical space.

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