Ten New Sydney Art Exhibitions to Jump-Start Your June

Fans of Sydney-based illustrator and graphic designer Harrison Earl will no doubt be eagerly anticipating his second solo show, Black Rainbow, coming up soon at M2 Gallery.

In a series of surreal, dreamlike works, Earl’s latest exhibition aims to explore the ideas of opposition and contrast. A single recurring character is seen travelling through the artworks, weaving an interconnected story. There’s an almost hallucinatory quality to the series. Think eerie floating bodies suspended mid-air and giant heads looming in hazy, candy-pink skies.

Apparently this is totally unlike anything Earl has done before – he doesn’t usually focus on painting. Definitely one to see if you like your art on the surreal side and with a strong comic book vibe. If you’re not familiar with him already, you can check out Earl’s Instagram and get a feel for his style.

Black Rainbow opens on Thursday June 8 from 6-9pm and then continues until Tuesday June 20. Pop in between 12 and 6pm.

Image: Harrison Earl (2017)

Opening at Firstdraft from June 7 is a new exhibition from Brisbane-based artist Tyza Stewart, whose self-portraits of ambiguously gendered selves interrogate fixed ideas of binary gender. Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail focuses on the issue of transgender visibility, and its potential use as a tool to limit discussion of queer experiences of gender.

Stewart works in what has been called a brutally honest, occasionally controversial way, using video and oil painting to create art that challenges and complicates the viewer’s perception of gender. The aim? To frustrate our ability to neatly categorise and apply normative readings to a person’s identity (something the artist has personally experienced during interactions with various journalists and art institutions), and instead embrace complexity, ambiguity and multiplicity.

Interviewed in Manuscript Daily, Stewart says, “I want to experience less rigid, polarised ways of understanding and being perceived, and I think a lot of other people might also benefit from this, so that’s the kind of larger political agenda I’m interested in being involved in.”

Promises to be a thought-provoking show.

Nope, we’re not finished with the group exhibitions. Pompom is hosting Contagious Magic, a group show featuring seven artists whose practice revolves around video and photography. Both the show title and the featured works apparently make reference to “the otherness” of Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World, Vol. W: Possible Musics (ten points if you know what that means).

Artists include Vivian Cooper Smith, whose Memory Loss series features rocks his now deceased grandfather collected over decades travelling around WA, exploring themes of time, mortality and memory. There’s also Jess Bradford, whose pieces form part of an ongoing project on the Tiger Balm Gardens, a Chinese cultural theme park in Singapore, drawing upon the park’s representation of Chinese culture in the form of myths, legends and history. You’ll also see work from Simon Del Favero, Charles Dennington, Tina Havelock Stevens, David Greenhalgh and Harley Ives.

A diverse, eclectic show that will suit art lovers possessing short attention spans.

When was the last time you saw an exhibition inspired by cockfighting? Never? Then see Joseph McGlennon’s latest show at Michael Reid, which draws upon the tradition within Balinese Hinduism.

Animal-lovers may well find the concept confronting, but in Bali, cockfights, or talen, are part of established religious practice, taking place in an ancient ritual to expel evil spirits — the blood of the losing bird is shed to provide an offering at events like temple festivals and religious ceremonies. McGlennon’s prints explore the idea that these birds are bred for aggression, trained to be killers, yet they simultaneously possess a holy significance. Hence the show title, Heavenly Fighters.

Expect mythical, ablaze-with-colour digital prints of the fighting creatures, capturing their virility and power. McGlennon has a background in branding and advertising, which partly explains his work’s visual oomph… plus a lot of time in post-production. Those familiar with his Kangaroo Studies (2010) or Florilegium #1 (2014) — which won him the Bowness Prize — can already attest to the majesty and mysterious power his pieces transmit.

Next up at Firstdraft is Untold Stories, a group show from Berlin-based artists Jessica Ekomane, Jasmine Guffond and Silje Nes.

Untold Stories examines the limits of human perception in relation to the technology shaping our modern environment. The three artists have backgrounds in sound installation, experimental sound and music (Nes releases music under both her own label, Noko Ana, and FatCat records — have a listen), along with a penchant for investigating the potential connections between sound, technology and politics.

This new show indulges their interest in how phenomena like global wireless networks and the vibrational properties of subsonic sounds exist in an inaccessible space beyond our sensory range as humans, using generative experiments and sound installation to play with the idea of perception itself. A must-see for those who take their art experimental with a splash of nerd.

While you’re at First Draft, you can also check out Tyza Stewart’s new show, Hey Remember When I Had a Rat-Tail.

Curious about contemporary art from the Philippines? Then hightail it to AGNSW for Passion and Procession, a feast of installations, videos, sculptures and paintings that reflect the rich past and dynamic present of the country’s artistic history. You’ll see works exploring religion, ancestral traditions, the relationship between the individual and the community, and the ongoing artistic influence of India, China, Spain and Mexico.

The show is part of the Bayanihan Philippine Art Project, a series of exhibitions and programs designed to celebrate the art and culture of the Philippines. It’s an exhibition full of contrast, from Santiago Bose’s oil and collage works exploring the intersection between faith and science, to Nona Garcia’s striking light box installations, to Geraldine Javier’s delicate silk organza and thread octopus-like creatures creeping out of wooden frames. And there’s a definite Diego Rivera quality to the colourful acrylic-on-canvas visions created by Rodel Tapaya.

While you’re at AGNSW, mosey on over to the Mervyn Bishop exhibition too.

Not one, but four brand spanking new exhibitions featuring all-female artists kick off on June 2 at AirSpace Projects, including Tracey Clements’ intriguing Metropolis Experiment. An installation of creeping salt and corroding steel, the piece is “part architectural model, part mad science” — the result being a ruined cityscape infused with the mood of a laboratory where something has gone horribly wrong. Clements is yet again inspired by JG Ballard’s 1962 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, The Drowned World.

Enter another room and you’ll find My Emotionalism, a colourful group exhibition curated by Ali Noble that features her own work alongside that of Grace Burzese, Cybele Cox, Danica Firulovic, Katy B Plummer and Helen Shelley. The group show sets out to “translate emotional states” — calling on viewers to feel rather than to think, to respond emotionally rather than to intellectualise.

In another room you’ll find the colourful geometrics of Susan Andrews’ Off-Centre. Andrews, a lecturer in painting at NAS, is intrigued by the intersection of contemporary art with architectural design, and this collection sees her create triangles, squares and rectangles to play with the idea of imbalance. Finally there’s Mangala Country by Broome-based artist Lydia Balbal, whose paintings explore stories of her family’s country in the Great Sandy Desert, which they were forced to leave during severe drought.

Sounds like the perfect way to spend a wintry afternoon.

This month, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art hosts An Omen Near and Far, an exhibition of the work of Vietnamese-Australian artist Dacchi Dang. Curated by Pedro de Almeida, the show embraces three decades of Dang’s photography, printmaking, video and installation, including a brand new work commissioned for the exhibition titled ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ – a wax bamboo forest that will be set alight and melted in a series of performances.

Opening on June 9, An Omen Near and Far also presents historical material from the archives of both Dang and 4A, including documentation of the creation of his work ‘The Boat’ (2001), a significant and memorable artistic consideration of Australia’s treatment of refugees.

Dang himself arrived in Australia as a refugee after fleeing war-torn Vietnam. His artistic practice is fed by an ongoing redefinition of what both place and home mean, and an ongoing attempt to articulate the complexity of diasporic experience. Through what he calls a “visually poetic language”, Dang aims to preserve stories for present and future Australian Vietnamese generations.

Fans of Sydney-based artist eX de Medici’s intricate watercolours will no doubt already have Spies Like Us in their calendar – opening at Sullivan+Strumpf on June 10.

This arresting new body of work focuses on western political power, the rise of surveillance states, and the relationship between life and death. The collection of watercolours combines the artists beautiful ornamentation and seriously virtuosic miniaturist technique with unsettling themes of violence and destruction. Expect images of helmets, guns and military paraphernalia garlanded by flowers, foliage and tiny birds. Works like ‘Root and Branch’ and ‘Persistence of Error’ entwine the beautiful with the violent and militaristic, the delicate with the brutal, challenging the viewer’s response and their destabilising their sense of aesthetic boundaries.

Those aware of eX de Medici’s background will see a connection between her experience as a tattoo artist (some of the works would make truly epic tats) and the overall aesthetic of Spies Like Us, with its nod to the vanitas tradition. Not one to miss.

If you’ve ever fantasised about amassing a seriously epic art collection you’ll want to head to EuroVisions at NAS – an exhibition drawn from the enviable family collection of Lisa and Danny Goldberg OAM.

The show’s curatorial goal is to present a “vibrant cross-section” of the latest happenings in contemporary art, displaying the diversity, exuberance and innovation of the current European scene. So you’ll see a whopping 100 works from 30 influential European contemporary artists — and by influential we mean seriously big names like Ugo Rondinone, Urs Fischer, Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Helen Marten and Rudolf Stingel. Seven of the artists on show have won the Turner Prize. You get the idea — the gang’s literally all here.

Also included in EuroVisions are several rising stars whose work hasn’t previously been shown in Australia. Head along for the chance to directly experience these rarely seen, significant works and hey, maybe even discover a new favourite artist amongst the ones-to-watch.