Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia

Exhibition Tour

Wednesday 1 March
1 –2pm
NAS Galleries

Please join us for a walk-through led by exhibition curator Richard Perram OAM.

Braving time is a queer exhibition that celebrates the work of artists who identify as part of the Australian LGBTIQA+ community. This significant exhibition has been curated by Richard Perram OAM for the National Art School in celebration of Sydney WorldPride in 2023. The artists represented in the exhibition celebrate the diverse voices of LGBTIQA+ people in contemporary Australia society, reflecting the breath of genders and sexualities within the community, including artists who identify as lesbian, gay, transgender, inter-sex, asexual and non-binary.

The artists present artworks that explore queerness in ways that are direct and indirect through historical and contemporary artworks that are critical, experimental and political, connecting to our contemporary culture. Together these works instigate conversations about queer experience; what it is and what it means to be queer in Australia today.

Richard Perram OAM is an independent curator and former director of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. His most recent exhibitions have been Liam Benson: Virtue without Stain for Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia for the NAS as part of the Sydney WorldPride 2023 Art Festival. He also curated the award winning exhibition The Unflinching Gaze: photo media and the male figure in 2017 at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.

Photo: Peter Morgan.

Art Forum: Luke Thurgate – Adore You

Wednesday 8 March
1 – 2pm
Cell Block Theatre

Join us as Luke Thurgate speaks through his latest exhibition Adore You.

Luke is currently completing a large-scale wall drawing as part of the National Art School’s Queer Contemporary program. Luke’s multi-disciplinary studio practice explores the construction and deconstruction of ‘identity’ in relation to masculinity, sexuality, romance and power. His current work uses the monster as a surrogate ’other’ to explore tensions between parody, sincerity, menace, pathos, transgression, and vulnerability. Luke’s work borrows from a range of sources, including popular culture, Catholic iconography, and queer historical archives.

Adore You takes inspiration from one of the world’s treasures, the major, 15th Century polyptych Ghent Altarpiece created by painters and brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyk. Thurgate’s work Adore You transforms the altarpiece format to create a contemporary, ephemeral artwork exploring notions of desire, hero-worship and queer subjectivity. Spanning three walls of The Drawing Gallery, the mural will be made onsite over a six-week period to coincide with Sydney WorldPride programs at the National Art School.

Photo: Peter Morgan.

Art Forum: Massive Overshare – Ida Lawrence
Wed 15 March
1 – 2pm
Black Theatre

Ida Lawrence is a visual artist who mixes storytelling and painting, mostly. She likes patterns; jokes; complimentary colours; tales of failure,
generosity, surprise and mis/communication; and playing with painting’s ‘visual language’ — how images and the ways they are painted are forms of storytelling, open to multiple interpretations. Her latest ‘solo* exhibition’ Basa-Basi / Chit-Chat was shown in Singapore at this year’s Art SG with ISA Art Gallery. Presently she is exhibiting at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney; Urban Nation: Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta with Woven Kolektif.

Lawrence graduated in 2009 with a painting major from the National Art School (former gaol), completed Honours at Sydney College of the Arts (former mental asylum), studied traditional Indonesian dance with the Darmasiswa Scholarship at Institute Seni Indonesia, Yogyakarta (former rice paddy), and continues to learn (informally). Since 2019 she has been based in Berlin and currently is a BPA// Berlin Program for Artist mentee. Awards include the Marten Bequest Scholarship for Painting from the Australia Council (2022-2024) and 2nd Place in the Black and White Arts and Crafts category of the 2008 Barmedman Show (prize money: $2).

Image: Ida Lawrence, I Fill My Days In Other Ways (work in progress), 2020, mural at Urban Spree, Berlin, 8 x 15 m. Photo: Lukas K Stiller

Art Forum: Emerging Technologies and the Expanded Art Field
Wed 22 March
1 – 2pm
Cell Block Theatre

The emergence of NFTs, blockchain, AI art generators and so-called metaverse platforms have provided artists with a new set of tools to create, distribute and monetise their work. Artists and collectors are embracing these technologies to participate in an expanded art world that no longer relies on traditional gatekeepers and art capitals. Likewise, artists are exploring the creative affordances of blockchain and AI to advance the conversations about these technologies and the ideas they represent. In this lecture, Jessica Priebe will explain how NFTs work and the events that led to the NFT boom and bust. She will consider the impact of blockchain technology in the art world and discuss recent trends in AI art and metaverse curation.

Dr Jessica Priebe is an art historian and lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at NAS. Her elective, Art in the Digital Age, focuses on the role of emerging technology in contemporary art. Jessica is a former research fellow in Enlightenment Studies with the Sydney Intellectual History Network and the author of Francois Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2021). Jessica works with artists, education and cultural institutions to develop and deliver NFT projects, exhibitions and events, generative AI and metaverse showcases, and Web3 workshops. Her research on emerging technologies in the arts and creative industries is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Sydney
University’s Incubate Startup program.

Image: Urs Fischer from the series CHAOS #1–#501, a collection of 501 unique digital sculptures released as individual NFTs on makersplace, 2021.