Sara Hughes’ installation work, The Big Stick Up, which was first shown at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in Sydney opens at The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu from 28 April until 10 June 2007.

The Big Stick Up is a phrase used by Hughes to describe the installation process of her signature vinyl works. It is also the title of this installation piece which makes reference to the ’stick em up’ catch phrase of Western films and to global politics.

“Sara Hughes is an artist compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Her obsessions splinter out from hybrid ideas around arcane information technologies, nasty computer viruses, codings, weaving patterns, networks, assorted digital communication systems, and the chimerical tricks of optical perception. Remnants and traces from recent technological, communication and filmic histories are gathered up by Hughes in an effort to infiltrate the present”.

Rhana Devenport
Director of The Govett Brewster Art Gallery

Buried Alive (video still) 2006

Adam Geczy

Buried Alive

Contemporary Art Centre of SA

Opens 13 April to 20 May 2007

“Contemporary Visual Art Projects SA 2007 Project 3 presents Buried Alive, three installation works by Sydney artist Adam Geczy, based on a series of videos he made during his residencies in northern Europe.

Like much of Geczy’s practice, Buried Alive speaks of politic dissent, and addresses traditional issues of love, death, loss, the fundamental nature of both human tactile experience and social alienation. It particularly draws on a masculine anxiety of conforming to stereotypical roles, and as catalogue essayist Jacqueline Millner states, this exhibition explores “broader political questions, about the relationship between repression in its many guises and constructions of manhood, about complicity in one’s own oppression, about the scapegoating of the criminal for endemic social ills”, and furthermore suggests that it “mobilises the idea that the values embedded in apparent democracies, and their seemingly innocuous institutions, facilitate the systemic abuse of power”.” www.cacsa.org.au/now/index_frames.html

See CACSA website for opening times and other information.