Museums and the Web Asia conference 2015

Like so many conferences, a number of really interesting ideas and concerns took shape during Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne and this post is an attempt to tease out and test those I found most pertinent. The highlights for me were learning about the Singaporean context from Angelita Teo, Director of the National Museum of Singapore, the…

Robert MacPherson: Reductive logic

The reductive logic that Robert MacPherson applied to his painting practice in the 1970s is applied here to his tool, the standard house painter’s brush. Examining it closely and considering its history, MacPherson traces a backwards path from use, to purchase, to manufacture and sees that the paintbrush is already a painted object. He relinquishes…

APT8 Highlight: Shigeyuki Kihara

Acquired for the Collection with the generous assistance of Mary-Jeanne Hutchinson, this intriguing series of photographs by Shigeyuki Kihara responds to the images of Samoa taken by Alfred Burton, who visited the Pacific in the 1880s, and looks to redress stereotypes of the Pacific perpetuated in colonial photography. In the late nineteenth century, French artist…

Robert MacPherson: A simplistic view of a national art

Robert MacPherson’s work is often positioned against the historically pervasive national traditions in Australian art of landscape painting and heroic narrative. His works evoking landscape and important figures are tinged with irony, and attempt to look beyond stereotype and jingoism. Yet still they suggest something specifically Australian – whether it is language, food or cultural…