Five Festival-Level Art Exhibitions Opening in May

Here is a little glimpse into a bizarre future where ideologies are amalgamated and the boundaries between class, sex and race have been erased. This is the forecast of Los Angeles-based artist Mark Whalen, who is presenting Improper Fraction at Chalk Horse Gallery in May 2015. As you will see, the ceramic works in the show take the form of hand-sculpted books, which can be seen as the keys to unlocking his curiously complex paintings. Harking back to high modernism, his practice evokes the mathematical spiritualism of movements such as De Stijl and the Bauhaus painters.

Head On Photo Festival is on throughout May, with Sydney galleries showcasing the freshest photography from across the globe. A fine example comes from recurring festival prize finalist Jonathan May, who is presenting Desert Ink, a striking new series of black and white portraits, at Gaffa Gallery. While travelling around Indio, California, May began documenting the lives of eight Mexican tattoo artists and reformed criminals. In between drug-dealing and jail time, these men became passionate about cultivating their craft. May’s dramatic smoke-filled images reveal both former lives and new identities.

One of our brightest video artists is exhibiting at Stills Gallery this month. Her latest series, titled simply Work, restages a local fruit market. The prettiness of Kawita Vatanajyankur’s art is like a packet of lollies — deliciously alluring. However, she often blends pain and humiliation with her Willy Wonka colour palette. Her work is a peculiar blend of quirkiness and body-aching intensity. Vatanajyankur is an endurance artist; she is perpetually testing her mental and physical limits. You are likely to see a heightened destructiveness where she is literally being worn down by banal tasks. In any case, Vatanajyankur is one of those can’t-look-away artists.

Sprinkling a bit of winter magic over Sydney, Vivid is back for a sixth year, and its Mechanised Colour Assemblage is tipped to be the multisensory centrepiece of Circular Quay. A collaboration between Rebecca Baumann and French-Italian collective Danny Rose, this installation is a continuously morphing listening and viewing experience. Translating Baumann’s work into an audiovisual facade is likely to prove tricky for Danny Rose. She uses unconventional materials such as tinsel, flip-clocks, fans and detonators; however, with 3D-mapping technology and an eight-channel sound system, the project will be spatially configured to conflate colour, sound and emotion. Both artists have solid reputations for pulling off large-scale interactive installations. Seeing them join forces is likely to produce a synaesthetic feast.

Dredging up your dusty CD collection, you may come across the jagged mountains of Kid A or the ghostly freeway of OK Computer. Conveniently for you and your ‘90s nostalgia, the reclusive artist behind Radiohead will be exhibiting at Carriageworks as part of Semi-Permanent. Stanley Donwood, aka Dan Rickwood, has designed the band’s posters and album artwork since 1994. The Panic Office is a major retrospective that will feature a whopping number of pieces, both seen and unseen. Donwood’s haunting imagery is full of vortexes and post-apocalyptic landscapes. His work is often introspective, as if wandering through the chaos of the mind. Capturing the sense of alienation stirred up by a group of alternative rock icons is no mean feat.