From the measure Johns port the Southwest Dweller Education of Art in 1978, he has pursued a career in sculpture and shapely a very flourishing jock practise with better commissions in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Island, Korea and Espana. He is also represented in both unexclusive and semiprivate collections throughout the world – from the UK to the US, from Country to Nippon. Over this punctuation of 30 eld there has been a gentle but deciding alteration in the artist’s standard concepts. Initially renowned for his monumental abstractionist structures, which were ofttimes fascinating visible paradoxes – in an staggering behaviour, ostensibly rounded switched from the human to the lyric. At Palmer, one sees a added process as Johns has free himself from the cityfied surround and embellish intensely alive of his basic links with the Aussie landscape.

The figures on the orbit at Linksman are as stark and striking as the genre itself. Some, such as Backward Figure, 1992-1993, in Austen steel, are as slight and emphatically perpendicular as the flowers on the indigen Yaccas (Xanthorrhoea), spell otherwise installations suchlike Corridor 11, 2004, are as spiky as its needle-sharp leaves. Floating Illustration 111, 1998, in Corten brace, appears to become from the rocks with a warning communicate. In sheer opposition to these slim activity, the two Shielder Figures, 1991-1992, jazz a monumental presence. Bilinear, wide lines of brace suggest two figures standing nearly select by side; the counterbalance and the repeating of kindred shapes is both satisfying and assuasive.

The creator, still, has not only prefab entirety that interrelate to the landscape, the landscape itself has needs had a unfathomed touch on the creator. Johns has inscribed, “Although I untaped in the suburbs, my mold is not alone citified in conceive; there is a roughness, endurance, vulnerability active the utilise which is different in conceive to the whitewashed, highly finished pass of the urban-based sculptors in Sydney.” And promote, “As an target shaper, I am abutting to the east states, but the finish grave is divers in search – I expect because it is from added realm.” In the movement to his 200

From a modest source in 2002, Greg Johns now has nearly 20 sculptures in brace permanently sited in the surround – he has planted his own mold genre. And generously, he has also prefab the region ready on a biennial cornerstone for an exposition of carve by opposite artists who desire to interrelate to the Australian landscape. Figure artists exhibited in the first exposition in Resist 2004 – artists including Max Lyle and Bert Flugelman, both ex-members of body from the Southern Inhabitant School of Art. By the ordinal period in 2008, the numbers had grown to 24 artists and numerous grouping from Adelaide prefab the locomote into the countryside. The invitations were distinctively unlike from the wonted gallery invitation: “Conditions. Fairish to stubborn terrain – capture prop.”

Palmer is sure unequaled, and real Continent. As indeed is Greg himself, who fresh wrote, in the launching of his 2008 compile New Sculptures, “As a constellation employed in this major landscape, I rest metagrobolized by how less carve produced in Australia reflects this situation, we are perhaps locked into our cities and socialism influences …” Greg Johns has moved beyond outside influences; he is producing apply that is nearly and integrally linked to this ancient earth.

Where and what is the border between film and visual art? Is it true that we see art but watch films? Such issues have been under discussion since Andy Warhol first played with film, though these days the words ‘moving image’ rather than film are used as many films are not made with actual film but with digital equipment. And it is certainly the advent of digital equipment — lighter, cheaper, quicker — that has led many more artists to make moving images part or all of their work. Maybe moving images are just a tool, but what a tool.

The biennial Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has made a huge global mark through part-funding, and sometimes commissioning, films with its investment fund. Successful examples from the past are Ten Canoes, Look Both Ways, Lucky Miles and The Home Song Stories. For the first time in 2009, the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund has commissioned a visual artist to make a work to be shown during the film festival.

Lynette Wallworth’s experimental approach to the moving image has seen her develop new ways of experiencing the illusions of which it is capable. Her moving image installations are interactive in subtle and complex ways that cross the boundary between the moving image and life as they play on the emotions of the viewer. The AFF’s newly commissioned moving image work by Wallworth, called Duality of Light, will be shown at the Samstag Museum of Art along with a retrospective of other significant and award-winning works she has made over the last seven years: Hold, Invisible by Night, Damavand Mountain and Beautiful Sunset.

And the creative nexus between moving images in cinema and gallery contexts will be explored in the two-day Art & the Moving Image Symposium. Speakers include: Mexican Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, senior curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Laurence Kardish; and Vasif Kortun, the founder of Platform Garanti, Istanbul.

Kortun is also curating Socially Disorganised, an exhibition of videos focusing on humorous urban dissent by international artists Halil Altindere, Fikret Atay, Cheng-Ta (Yu), Hala Elkoussy, Daniel Guzman, Kuang-Yu (Tsui), Minouk Lim, Ahmet Ögüt, Wael Shawky, Nasan Tur and Alexander Ugay, to be shown at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).

The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) is showing Scratch an Aussie by Richard Bell, which uses satirical role reversal to comment on racism in Australia. The show also includes famous Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s Fairytale — a documentary about the passage of 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12 — and CACSA curator Peter McKay’s Road Movies — a local contribution by 15 Adelaide-based artists who have each made a digital video in one week with a basic camera. McKay says, “The idea is to emphasise the immediacy of the medium and cultivate the conditions to construct a coherent yet significantly improvised exhibition.”

ORLAN is perhaps most well known in Australia as being the first artist to use surgery for artistic ends with her surgery performances. In 1998 she launched an international exploration into different standards of beauty, beginning in Mexico with Pre-Columbian civilisation. Having refigured her face through a series of plastic surgeries she hybridizes her new image to the aesthetic values from this other cultures. Working with a digital technician to mingle the real with the virtual, taking the ‘other’ inside under her own skin, she creates digital melds of her face with the stone of the Pre-Columbian sculptures, making self-hybridizations in which the grotesque becomes inseparable from the beautiful. Works in this exhibition are for sale.

TarraWarra Museum of Art

Healesville

Tuesday to Sunday, 11am–5pm

TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) is extolled by its director, the legendary Maudie Palmer, as “the first significant museum in the country funded by private individuals”. This, of course, is in contradistinction to those who have built fine collections and donated them to public galleries — the Smorgons to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, for instance, and John Kaldor to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the near future, we’ll see David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art outside Hobart and Judith Neilson’s Contemporary Chinese collection at a newly completed artspace in inner Sydney’s Chippendale.

But the Besens — Eva and Marc, who built the Sussan chain of fashion stores — were in there from the moment the Howard government changed the philanthropy laws in 1999 to allow averaging of such gifts over five tax years and did much to take the capital gains issue out of contemporary art. Also in there from that time was Maudie Palmer — happy to move on from the Heide Gallery in Melbourne to the green field site in the Yarra Valley where the Besens already had a winery.

So, in a sense, the TWMA is as much Palmer’s dream as her patrons’ — who continue to add paintings to the 117 they donated in 1999 — 77 at last count. Housed in the Allan Powell, designed long, low building that has a distinct Tuscan flavour in the evening light of the Valley, the museum is 90 minutes out of Melbourne. That may sound pretty rural to potential visitors, with the nearest public transport at Lilydale. But Palmer argues that TWMA is a cultural hub in the one segment of Melbourne’s hinterland that doesn’t have a good regional gallery, and so dominates an area that draws plenty of visitors for the wine, a restful weekend or even a long lunch. And the museum is attached to the TarraWarra winery’s restaurant and tasting room.

But will they see the same 200 artworks on every visit? “Of course not,” says Palmer, who assures visitors that there is always a selection of Besen works on show (and on-screen images of the whole shebang), but there may also be the TarraWarra Biennial — now twice as successful as Melbourne’s single attempt at the genre — or a touring show like works from the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Melbourne, which will be at TWMA over the coming summer.

You may have noticed the predominance of the word ‘painting’ in describing the collection. “The Besens began collecting in the 1950s,” says Palmer, “when commercial galleries were just opening up in Australia.” Names such as Koman, Purves and Skinner became their friends and mentors, and so did the main artists of that era. Their Christmas parties for the art world were legendary. So their collection was built around Arthur Boyd and Nolan, Drysdale, Dobell and Dickerson, Olsen and Fred Williams, Tucker and Tuckson. And they were pretty set in their ways when both Indigenous and postmodern art came on the scene. “Since 2006, we’ve had a policy of adding a little of both — though not too much, as it would destroy the homogeneity of the collection.”

And a case can certainly be made, as Eva and Marc Besen argue in their forward to the TWMA booklet, that the collection “illustrates the evolution of Australian art during the second half of the 20th century, demonstrating the distinctiveness of Australian modernism”.

The TarraWarra Biennial

Lost and Found, curated by Charlotte Day, runs until 9 November 2008. And Aboriginal desert art from the Pizzi Collection, under the mysterious title of Mythology & Reality, opens on 25 November 2008, running until the end of summer.