It’s SALA Festival season, when every gallery, café, hallway, nook, cranny and front bar around South Australia is adorned with art from our State’s booming community of artists. With this year’s program sitting at a hefty fifty pages, it can all be a bit daunting for the casual art lover.
There’s just so much to see, hear and touch! Actually you probably shouldn’t touch, but whatever your taste you’ll easily find something to get your synapses firing, whether it’s modern art, installations, expressionists or avant garde sculpture. Don’t even get us started on nice paintings of hillsides!
We’ve worn our thumbs raw flicking through the pages of this year’s delicious SALA spread to narrow it down to 10 accessible, immersive starting points to begin your South Australian art adventure.
So here are a few exhibitions to dip your toes into:
Jessica Clark – About and Falling
As winner of the Rip It Up Young Artist Award for SALA 2015 Jessica Clark won us over with her vivid photography, with this exhibition About And Falling capturing her fascination with water and everything that lives within it.
Naomi Murrell, Ebenezer Place
August 1-31
CACSA Contemporary 2015 exhibition
An oasis of experimental, immersive and surprising art innocuously nestled among the quiet leafy suburbia of Parkside, the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia is often host to some incredible installations and exhibitions. Throughout SALA the space is home to work by Angela Valamanesh, Mark Kimber, Sam Howie and Ian North, with Joe Felber taking over the adjacent ‘Project’ space.
This year’s CACSA Contemporary program centres on twin city galleries, SASA Gallery and Kerry Packer Civic Gallery, with artists Roy Ananda, Matthew Bradley, Sundari Carmody, Marcin Kobylecki and Michelle Nikou exhibiting. Meanwhile the wider CACSA program is spread right around the city, with over 40 artists featuring in exhibitions across some of Adelaide’s most interesting spaces including Adelaide Central Gallery, FELTspace, Greenaway Art Gallery, Light Square Gallery and more.
Various locations
Details here
Alise Hardy – Sad.
With a range of meticulously rendered drawings of faces captured in all manner of distress, this exhibition by the winner of SALA’s 2015 Rural Emerging Artist award Alise Hardy looks compelling and, despite its somewhat tragic subject matter, kind of life-affirming.
Bond & Lane Canteen, Colonel Light Gardens
July 27 – August 31
Vanaema: The Exhibition
Curated by Adelaide artist Michal Kedem, this exhibition brings together the work of Kedem’s own grandmother Helve Aisatullin, an 84 year old refugee from post-war Estonia whose expressionist work eschews the canvas for anything from cabinet doors to cardboard.
Tenth & Gibson, Bowden
August 9-12
Amanda Radomi & Henry Jock Walker: The Expanding Field of RAWH
Artists Amanda Radomi and Henry Jock Walker have teamed up for one of Tandanya’s two SALA exhibitions. With a multimedia installation incorporating painting, video, flags and sculpture the collaboration will dissect identity and cultural politics in a new and interesting way.
Tandanya is also host to a collection of work by Kym Kropinyeri, an artist who returns from an almost decade-long break from painting to unveil a series of new work. The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Tree explores Kropinyeri’s own experiences and travels along with the intersection of culture, class and country.
Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute
July 29 – September 26
Emma Hack – Gen Z – Generation Next
Whether she’s painting Wally de Backer for insanely popular video clips or holding down her North Adelaide art gallery, Emma Hack is a reliably prominent name around SA’s art scene. For this year’s SALA Festival Hack moves beyond her body art background to explore themes of the future and youth through some “delicate embroidery works”.
Emma Hack Gallery, North Adelaide
August 5-30
West End Art Walk
If you’d prefer to condense several galleries into one brisk experience, this event spans several exhibitions in the one West End route. With a combination of installations, interactive live art, music and most importantly, “fun activities”, its kind of like a pub crawl but without matching t-shirts, digestive unrest and trips to The Elephant.
August 6-8
Details here
Giles Bettison: Pattern & Perception
A big name on the international glass art scene, North Adelaide-based Giles Bettison has spent decades perfecting and pushing the centuries-old Venetian “Murrini” practice of creating vivid mosaic glass structures. Always innovating, this exhibition is a fitting addition to the Jam Factory’s program and a potent reminder of the many and varied art forms being honed and expanded to international acclaim in our own backyard.
The Jam Factory
July 17 – September 12
Milieu
Bringing together work by three emerging SA photographers and ACA students Molly García-Underwood, Roseanne May and Emmaline Zanelli, this exhibition is described as “a visual conversation between places that will never meet”. We’re a little rusty on art-speak, but that roughly means “incredible photos of different places that you’ll wish you’ve visited, and experiences you’ll wish you’ve had”. It even comes in zine form, so you can take it home with you.
Open Studio Adelaide, Sturt Street
August 7-31
Home Is Where The Heart Is
Just remember SALA isn’t all about the city – far from it! This exhibition brings together eight artists based in the Southern Fleurieu region working across a disparate range of mediums and art forms from photography to jewellery, ensuring there’s something for every taste – even that friend of yours who’s only into textile art. Exhibiting artists include Dana Kinter, Eileen Lubiana, Michele Nooteboom, Warren Pickering, Anna Small, Kim Thomson, Sarah Wood and Corey Dodd, who is responsible for this hirsute fellow wearing an umbrella-toting octopus as a hat. Not even your most forward thinking hipster friend could claim to be ahead of that fashion curve.
Stump Hill Gallery, McLaren Vale
August 9 – September 13
But of course this is just a tiny, tiny sample of the six hundred and ten listings in this year’s SALA Festival. Get over to the SALA website for more information, but more importantly, get out of the house and see some art!
Read More:
Jessica Clark wins Rip It Up Young Artist Award, SALA 2015
George Brandis Art protest opening in Adelaide
Images:
All images via SALA / respective artists
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