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Art Month Sydney 2013

Time Out artfully hand-picks the festival’s must-sees and must-dos

First published on 25 Feb 2013. Updated on 25 Mar 2013.

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The Sydney art calendar comes to life in March, and our fourth annual Art Month Sydney festival is the proof. With a special emphasis this year on creative partnerships, the festival involves more than 300 exhibiting artists, 200 art events – including talks, seminars, workshops, tours, night-time events and arty parties – in 100 art venues all around the city.

To get you started, Time Out picked the top ten highlights of Art Month Sydney 2013 and interviewed the artists involved. Check out the Art Month website for much, much more – and get amongst it.

Adam Norton: Interplanetary Society

Gallery9

On a recent visit to the library of a space agency, Adam Norton was struck by the colour and optimism of science fiction book covers of the pre-Apollo ’60s. The resulting exhibition of space-pop paintings is a nostalgic telescopic look back at the Golden Age of Space Exploration…

Chicks on Speed: SCREAM

Artspace

Describing them as a “multi-national musical and fine art ensemble” only goes some of the way to describing Chicks on Speed. The collective spent 15 years putting the ‘art’ in party: bouncing over the boundaries between music, fashion, art, video and design – and always looking incredibly fabulous doing it, clothed or unclothed.

Christine Drummond

Butler Goode Gallery

As far as artist’s intentions go, it actually feels like something of a rarity: Christine Drummond wants the viewer to feel happy. “When I choose my colours, and when I apply them on the canvas with my palette knife, I always wish that this particular painting will brighten somebody’s day,” says Drummond.

For the Love of God: Is Contemporary Art a Joke?

Alaska Projects

What is art? Where does art come from? What is the point of art? What is it good for? What should one look for in art? Where should one look for art? Where should one hide it?

Six Sydney art lovers and arty types – including writer Eddie Sharpe and critic Andrew Frost – come together at Alaska Projects to get to the bottom of all your arty questions.

Gemma Smith

Sarah Cottier Gallery

When your eyeballs meet one of Gemma Smith’s large, square, two-colour artworks, they become preoccupied with mentally untangling their loopy overlapping brushstrokes. Smith calls them ‘tangle’ paintings.

Maria Kontis: Irene and the Void

Darren Knight Gallery

Artist Maria Kontis tells us that, as she was corresponding with Time Out over email, she was watching a mother taking snapshots of her daughter on her phone. Lately, she’s been thinking a lot about “the overwhelming flood of instant photos and images of all kinds”. Kontis’s gentle, contemplative work is an antidote to that.

Nicola Smith: Memories for Tomorrow

Galerie Pompom

Nicola Smith’s Memories for Tomorrow is something of a tribute to cinema. “I am interested in the relationship between cinema and painting,” says Smith, “in repetition, light and the passing of time. It is an obsessive practice whereby I feel compelled to make the same pictures time and time again.”

Nude Life Drawing

Sydney Beach

Why should the model be the only person to get to enjoy being nude at a life drawing class? A regular but little known happening has gotten the Art Month seal of approval in 2013: a life drawing class on Sydney Beach, where the nudity of all participants is encouraged.

Oliver Watts: The Sea Hare

Chalk Horse

A strange and little-known Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale has inspired Oliver Watts’s new show at Chalk Horse. The original story follows a young man who, with the help of a cunning fox, wins the hand of a haughty princess by evading her omniscient gaze.

Patricia Piccinini

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Patricia Piccinini’s strange silicone sculptures look real but, at the same time, like they couldn’t possibly be real. “Like flesh has taken on a life of its own, unconstrained by the rules of anatomy,” she says.

Words by Darryn King |

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