Associated artists Mark Kimber & Matthew Thorne announced as finalists in the Olive Cotton Award

MARK KIMBER and MATTHEW THORNE are finalists in the Olive Cotton Award - a $20,000 biennial national award for excellence in photographic portraiture in memory of photographer Olive Cotton. The 2023 Award judge is Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham. On display at Tweed Regional Gallery from 14 July - 24 September 2023.

Mark Kimber is a long time associate of the gallery and Matthew Thorne is set to debut new works in his GAGPROJECTS exhibition Out the back of beyond: Marungka Tjalatjunu & The Sand That Ate The Sea opening June 7th, 2023.

Mark Kimber, Dash at 18, 75 x 50cm, Pigment Print, 2023

Matthew Thorne, Portrait of Warren Ellis, 2023

GAGPROJECTS congratulates both artists and looks forward to the award exhibition, opening July 14

GAGPROJECTS announces representation of Christine Healy

Christine Healy, A dream picture, 2022, oil on canvas, 122 x 152cm, photo: Andrew Curtis

Christine will have her first solo exhibition with GAGPROJECTS this coming July. New paintings will be on show in her exhibition titled - PAINTERLAND - Healy states that her "painting is an enquiry into being human and being here on the earth. My quest involves risk taking and spontaneity as I labour to transcend the materiality of the oil paint and capture some magic along the way. I work the oil paint affectionately using brush, palette knife, rubber wedge and my hands. Sometimes I am less affectionate about the outcome but mostly the end result is a kind of painterly bricolage of mark making and revisions – referencing mysticism, myth, landscape, history, art and eschatological themes."

James Tylor: TURRANGKA... IN THE SHADOWS at UNSW Galleries, Sydney

GAGPROJECTS congratulates James Tylor on this extraordinary survey of his work curated by Leigh Robb.

Multi-disciplinary artist James Tylor combines historical and contemporary photographic processes to explore his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch and Norwegian) ancestry.

‘Turrangka…in the shadows’ surveys a decade of Tylor’s practice and, for the first time, brings together the most comprehensive selection of his unique daguerreotypes, expansive digital photographic series, hand-made Kaurna cultural objects, and furniture. The exhibition title is drawn from a Kaurna word, highlighting a significant ongoing aspect of Tylor’s practice: the learning and sharing of his Indigenous language. As well as shadow, turra also translates to reflection, image, and mirror.

At the core of Tylor’s practice is a continuously innovative programme of photographic intervention, disrupting the image to redact or highlight visual information. He systematically alters the reading of Country by excising information from the photographic print or inscribing language and place-names onto the surface of his daguerreotypes. These photographs provide a glimpse into Tylor’s broader practice of recreating Kaurna cultural artefacts, architecture, and ephemera. Antiquated analogue photographic processes including Becquerel daguerreotypes and hand-tinting are also used to generate a new archive of pseudo-historical images. Tylor’s recreations point to the absence of these images from the hegemonic depiction of colonial Australia’s visual history.

These strategies are at the service of exploring the suppression and erasure of Aboriginal cultural history from the Australian landscape through the ongoing legacy of colonialism. Tylor considers his actions of learning Kaurna language and reviving culture on Country as a means of repatriation. ‘Turrangka…in the shadows’ looks at the complex interplay of techniques and the incisive observations on Australia’s fraught history that characterise Tylor’s prolific and profound artistic practice.