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Blue Mountains City Art Gallery
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ARTEXPRESS
27 May – 16 Jul
ARTEXPRESS brings together a selection of outstanding student artworks developed for the artmaking component of the HSC examination in Visual Arts in NSW. The exhibition celebrates student achievement and aims to connect communities through the visual arts. The works provide insights into issues that are important to the young artists, such as cultural and gender identity, mental health, notions of home, social media, globalisation and climate change.
In 2023 we are showcasing the work of 43 students from across NSW including work by students local to our region.
ARTEXPRESS is a joint project between New South Wales Department of Education and New South Wales Education Standards Authority
Ida Jaroš and Bette Mifsud: Shifting Screens
24 Jun – 13 Aug
Shifting Screens is a collaboration between Ida Jaroš and Bette Mifsud containing over 60 urban and rural landscapes photographed from moving vehicles. It engages with the fleeting nature of human life, and the navigation of its uncertain terrains.
Ida Jaroš’s Commuter works are shot from Western Sydney trains. Her layered, impalpable and disconcerting urban landscapes contain transparent distortions and reflections. Bette Mifsud’s Breathing Rain is her requiem for the ravages of climate change, and recent personal loss, trauma and grief.
A Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Altitude exhibition
Artist Talk: Dr Bette Mifsud and Ida Jaroš
Saturday 15 Jul
11 am – 12 pm
Join us as the artists discuss their shared Western Sydney migrant heritage, the expanded field of landscape photography and more.
FREE event, everyone welcome Reservations via Eventbrite.
Blue Mountains City Art Gallery
Tracing the Rupture
22 Jul – 10 Sep
Tracing the Rupture explores sel ood and the fractured contexts we experience throughout life. Those moments where we confirm or develop our identity as a consequence of what we’ve lost or what has been taken from us. From fractured spaces comes a new narrative that informs our futures. This is the dialogue that exists between the artist and the rupture, the individual and the context.
Tracing the Rupture acknowledges junctures of turmoil, and how those experiences have informed the process of the artist. Whether this is a personal narrative that has been fractured, an historical or collective fragmentation, or a disruption to the landscape, these artworks reference how we repair and continue to rebuild our lives in the wake of rupture. Exhibiting artists; Fiona Davies, Szymon Dorabialski, Maddison Gibbs, Rachael Harrex, Eloise Maree, Judith Martinez Estrada, Juundaal Strang-Yettica, Ali Tayahori and Meng-Yu Yan.
Panel Discussion with Artists and Curator
Saturday 22 Jul
11 am – 1 pm
Join Curator Hayley Zena Poynton, alongside artists Fiona Davies, Szymon
Dorabialski, Maddison Gibbs, Rachael Harrex, Eloise Maree, Judith Martinez Estrada, and Ali Tahayori in the Gallery to discuss their artist practices, and emergent themes within Tracing the Rupture
$5.50 / FREE InSight Members
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Writing Pictures
Saturday 12 Aug 10.30 am – 3.30 pm
Join us for a text-based art workshop with exhibiting artist Judith Martinez Estrada, and poet and short story writer, Craig Billingham. The workshop employs techniques from the visual arts and writing (e.g. collage) to create narratives from found and archival images. From these, you will make a booklet and contribute to a collaborative artist book.
$140 / $120 InSight Members* Early bird price: $130 / $110 InSight Members for bookings before Sunday 23 July Bookings essential via Eventbrite.
Katya Petetskaya: Am I Nature?
19 Aug – 8 Oct
Katya Petetskaya’s Altitude exhibition Am I Nature? features fluid, gestural paintings which respond to the artist’s personal examination of their relationship with nature. Contemporary environmental events and experiences of solastalgia have led many to question their individual relationships with nature.
Am I Nature? shares a way of processing these experiences. The exhibited works on aluminium, canvas and synthetic paper demonstrate a painting method developed by the artist and influenced by Petetskaya’s performance art practice. Biomorphic and anthropomorphic forms that result from this process act as an invitation to acknowledge, accept and transcend one’s own grief, anxiety, vulnerability, and homesickness in the ever-changing world.
Katya Petetskaya Artist Talk and Performance
Saturday 19 Aug
2 pm – 4 pm
Join Katya Petetskaya for an artist talk and performance in the Gallery. This discussion will expand on the origins of performance as a visual arts practice conceived in the 1960s, and how it has impacted her contemporary practice.
By developing a gestural, abstract language and expressive mark making, Petetskaya’s works represent deeply emotive responses to her own personal history as well as society’s broader trends and trajectories. As a result of these influences and concerns, in many ways, Petetskaya’s work embodies a way in which she interprets, processes and seeks to better understand a world that is constantly in flux and reaching yet another tipping point.
$5.50 / FREE InSight Members
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Blue Mountains City Art Gallery
Sensorial
16 Sep – 12 Nov sensorial embraces all our senses, and moves beyond the dominance of sight within the Gallery space. The exhibition consists of immersive environments that can be experienced through a variety of senses. Visitors can engage at their own level, either looking at the creative installations or participating in them by gently touching, hugging, interacting and listening.
Created for and by the neurodivergent community the exhibition aims to be an inclusive space for those who are often overwhelmed by bright lights and loud noises; or those who experience the world through touch and find looking unsatisfying.
Exhibiting artists: Alison Bennett with Megan Beckwith & Ramana Dienes-Browning, Liam Benson, Inspired by Art led by Clare Delaney, Katoomba Neurodiversity Hub with Amy Bell, Bailee Lobb, Prue Stevenson, and Hannah Surtees.
A Blue Mountains City Art Gallery exhibition curated by Rilka Oakley sensorial
This exhibition is supported by the Dobell Exhibition Grant, funded by the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation and managed by Museums & Galleries of NSW.
In Conversation
Saturday 16 Sep
11 am – 12 pm
Join a discussion with the exhibition curator Rilka Oakley and some of the exhibiting artists, learn about their creative process as well as how to fully engage with this interactive exhibition.
$5.50 / FREE InSight Members
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Sensory Concert
Sunday 22 Oct 10.30 am – 12 pm
Have you ever wanted to attend a concert but were too worried about being judged by others or shushed? Sensory Concerts® are performed by acclaimed musicians in a relaxed setting, with small numbers and onsite therapist support. These inclusive concerts are specially designed for children and adults with sensory or special needs including autism, ADHD, Sensory Processing Disorder, physical and intellectual disabilities.
$10 Adult / $5 Child (16 and under) / $20 Family (4 members of a group with at least 1 adult) Booking essential via Eventbrite.
Blue Mountains City Art Gallery
Karlina Mitchell: a place with no other
14 Oct – 3 Dec a place with no other, explores Karlina Mitchell’s Fijian heritage and her connection to her current home, the Blue Mountains. This solo exhibition is a personal glimpse into multigenerational connections and practices, where the spirit of Talanoa, the act of sitting and yarning in Fijian culture, comes to life. a place with no other employs a myriad of artistic practices, from photography and collage to video installation and performance, fostering a sense of home and nostalgia. By fusing images of the Blue Mountain’s landscape with Fijian imagery and vintage postcards, Karlina Mitchell delicately explores concepts of home, belonging and familial togetherness.
Karlina Mitchell Artist Talk
Saturday 14 Oct
11 am – 12 pm
This engaging artist talk will carry the spirit of Talanoa, the act of sitting and yarning in Fijian culture. Karlina Mitchell aims to elaborate on concepts and feelings of home through a multitude of artistic forms. As a skilled multidisciplinary artist Mitchell gently explores belonging and the family unit. Through the process of combining found images with her own photography and handdrawn motifs, a sense of nostalgia is born.
$5.50 / FREE InSight Members
Tickets via Eventbrite.
Saturday 4 Nov 10.30 am – 1.30 pm
In this workshop you will begin with photos, postcards, or printed images, Karlina will demonstrate how to embellish a photomontage with a variety of mixed media. By starting with a collage composition then using processes to disrupt this image with embroidery, posca pens and paint, you will create an embellished mixed media collage. Photos and other printed materials will be provided, participants are encouraged bring photos from home that they wish to use.
$84 / $72 InSight Members*
Early bird price: $78 / $66 InSight Members, for bookings before Sunday 16 Jul Bookings essential via Eventbrite.
Q&A with Katya Petetskaya
Curator, Hayley Zena Poynton, delves into Altitude
Artist Katya Petetskaya’s practice and learns more about her upcoming exhibition Am I Nature?
Hayley Zena Poynton: Your practice expands past the binaries of painting and performance, how do you feel this interdisciplinary approach allows you to materialise your ideas?
Katya Petetskaya: My practice is process driven, to me there is no separation between painting and performance. My painting process has been heavily influenced by my performance process, and vice versa. Performance art has largely developed from concepts of visual art, and while its methodologies are frequently used in dance and theatre, I believe there is a huge potential that performance art can transfer back to visual artists. This is what I seek to advocate through my practice. I turned to performance art because it helped me to expand and deepen my understanding of the painting medium and increase my body awareness when creating works. In turn, my work with the visual image has influenced my performance.
HZP: When approaching a new body of work, do you have any rituals or processes that you feel support your artistic practice?
KP: Thank you for this very interesting question! Curiously, I have been told several times before that I approach my painting as a ritual. From the moment of conception to its final result, I try to approach each new work without having any preconceived ideas of how it should turn up. I spend some time ‘emptying myself’ from any pre-existing knowledge and beliefs about what my painting material is and how it should behave. Meditation is very helpful here. I use performance art methodologies to rediscover the functionality of my material in relation to my artistic medium: my body. This allows me to really study my material again and again, because ultimately – the body is always changing.
HZP: The inclusion of your body is central to your practice. Has this always been an element of consideration within the way you create?
KP: While one can never remove one’s body from the creation process, it took me some time to develop an awareness of my body as an artistic medium. My performance art practice has been crucial here. I gradually developed a painting method that incorporates performance art techniques that allowed me to process ideas through and with my body. There is also a performative aspect in creating the work that allows me to play with form and nuance, abstraction and representation.
HZP: Moments of upheaval, from societal shifts to the changing climate, are underlying subjects within your practice. Your way of responding to, and in turn interpreting these events seems to generate a true practice of reflection, from an external, out of body perspective as well as body-centric view. How do you maintain a clear vision while maintaining both mindsets?
KP: It is true that experiencing major societal upheavals and drastic changes have influenced my practice. I think even my technique and process reflect this fluctuation between the sense of precariousness and uncertainty and seeking some order. Painting and performance have been my rescuers, giving form and meaning to the formless mass of inner insights. I think I do manage to maintain both mindsets but there is never a clear vision. It is very important for me not to use pre-existing images or references in my work. The compositions arrive in the exact moment of the painting and performative act, while I try to engage my whole body. I believe the answers and inspiration I seek are already there, stored within my material and my own body.
HZP: AmINature?is an exhibition rooted in the natural world. Do you feel living in the majesty of the Blue Mountains has impacted the way you approach art-making and the themes you’re currently exploring?
KP: My studio is now based in the Blue Mountains, and I definitely draw my creative energy from the power of the surrounding green ocean. It is my questioning of my relationship with nature that was the initial impulse for this exhibition; questioning that started when I moved to the Blue Mountains in 2019. And in this context, when I use the word ‘nature’ I mean Earth. I am interested in exploring the connection between humans and Earth. If you think about it, everything that is alive is programmed to survive, and while death is an unavoidable part of the natural cycle of life on Earth, we humans have always sought ways of extending nature’s boundaries. Where does this deep longing for immortality come from? If it is unnatural, then why and where did this idea originate from? Are we nature?
Q&A with Hannah Surtees
Artistic Program Leader, Rilka Oakley, chats with Hannah Surtees about her works featured in sensorial.
Rilka Oakley: Previous works of yours have been interactive – can you tell me how the audience will be interacting with your work for sensorial?
Hannah Surtees: The installation piece for sensorial is a group work, inviting people from all walks of life to sit and wrap an everyday object and add to the display in the gallery. This task is designed to bring people together, by wrapping the objects I am hoping they can find comfort in the mindful and meditative practice which seeks to celebrate the everyday. By using recognisable objects from the kitchen, I aim to reframe the monotony and tedium of domesticity, by reflecting on a sense of purpose through a repetitive task.
RO: What does the wrapping mean to you?
HS: I feel a very deep connection to wrapping; partly due to our son being born prematurely, and spending so much time in hospital, we used swaddling as our only way to protect and comfort him, and I find the act of wrapping to be soothing and meditative. I find textiles enjoyable to work with in the way it can knot into itself… it’s very satisfying.
RO: I know some of your work has been about healing through making, can you tell us how this work fits this theme?
HS: As adults, we tend to block things out and cover things up, I find artmaking to be mentally healing, whenever I sit and engage with an art practice I get into the flow and feel at peace. I like to tap into my inner child, not questioning too much and going on a gut feeling, free to make with no preconceived ideas. This particular body of work explores innate feelings of comfort; the raw emotions that seek it and everyday actions that provide it.
What’s On Culture Dose for Kids
8 sessions (ages 9 – 12) Sundays, 23 Jul – 10 Sep 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Culture Dose for Kids (CDK) is an eight-week term of Sunday morning art classes for children and parents. Our Gallery is a safe space for self-expression to build confidence and foster social connections, to help support children and families through stressful or anxious times. CDK sessions focus on children’s wellbeing by exploring nature, colour and feeling through looking at the natural world and artworks from both the current exhibition and the Gallery’s collection. CDK is aimed at supporting children with anxiety and those impacted by natural disasters.
The project is a collaboration between Blue Mountains Culture Centre, Black Dog Institute and the Art Gallery of NSW.
FREE event. Email semerson@bmcc.nsw.gov.au if you would like to be part of CDK.
www.leuragardensfes
$40 all gardens - $20 three gardens - $10 single garden. Tickets will be available on the Festival website from 1 August, 2023. All tickets are valid for the duration of the Festival.
