Home away from home

Walk into the Art Gallery of New South Wales and you get the feeling New Zealand is all over it. First up in the main hall is a sizable sampling of Lisa Reihana’s work including photographs and videos in Double Take, the finalists in the Anne Landa Award for video and media. Downstairs a large gallery has been given over to an et al. project. They have created another of their dystopian worlds; empty seating, chain link fence, complex sound tracks and the unforgiving eye of Google Earth drifting over burnt brown landscapes. Across the way on a facing wall a large painting Counting One, Two, Three by Australian Imants Tiller is dominated by imagery taken/lifted/borrowed from Colin McCahon’s own borrowings, recast into Tillers’ signature style. If you go down the hill and across the road you can also catch Peter Robinson’s extraordinary installation at Artspace. Then, later this week, Michael Stevenson is set to open at Darren Knight’s. New Zealand art - world famous in Australia.
Images: Top, Peter Robinson at Artspace. Bottom, etal. at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.