Nothing but Reality: My World in Paintings

Spectrum Project Space presents Nothing but Reality: My World in Paintings, a stunning solo exhibition by contemporary Chinese artist Xuning Wang.

The exhibition will showcase paintings that are representative of the artist's experiences of contemporary life in both Australia and China and will feature new works from a series of paintings, The High Dam Makes a Great Lake, exploring the controversial Three Gorges Dam of the Yangzi River in China.

Xuning Wang is from Jinan, China and is currently undertaking a PhD at Edith Cowan University (ECU) researching realism in art. Nothing but Reality: My World in Paintings will be opened by Dr Christopher Crouch from Edith Cowan University's School Communications and Arts.

Nothing but Reality: My World in Paintings
image courtesy of Xuning Wang

The End of Everything / Streetworks

The End of Everything and Streetworks are two concurrent solo exhibitions of meditative photographic works by Perth artist Kevin Ballantine.

Armed with notes on Renaissance art and old churches, museum floor plans, a digital SLR camera and two "anything-can-happen" plastic cameras, Ballantine headed to Europe in November 2008.

The result is this exhibition of photographs that beautifully capture urban landscapes, art, sculptures, monuments and people encountered whilst wandering through the streets of Rome, Florence, Sienna, Paris and London.

Visually the shows will look very different given the two camera formats, united however by a catalogue essay in the form of journal excerpts.

The exhibitions are perhaps the final chapter in a body of work, a narrative, which Ballantine has been working on and exhibiting for over a decade, loosely associated with pilgrimage and sacred places.

The End of Everything / Streetworks
image courtesy of Kevin Ballantine

Discordant Natures

Discordant Natures is an exhibition of new installations by Spectrum Project Space artists-in-residence, Janet Carter and Annie Hsiao-Wen Wang. The installation works will explore the sense of discomfort and unease with which we deal with our bodies in contemporary culture.

Annie Hsiao-Wen Wang brings sculpture and objects into an ensemble of work that occupies the space with a disturbingly broken sense of presence. Using a seemingly uninteresting everyday object as the subject of her scrutiny (a pair of underwear), she raises questions on the discordant and fragmented way with which we approach our feminine body, sexuality and identity.

Janet Carter's work takes inspiration from queer and feminist theories of the body as 'Other', as objects, and as constrained, bound or disciplined by this 'Otherness'. This exhibition sees Carter's work take the form of an immersive installation combining sculptural forms created from bound inner tubes, and video works which illustrate the performed act of binding those 'bodies'.

Discordant Natures - image courtesy of Annie Hsiao-Wen Wang