The Christmas Tree Bucket, Trent Parke's Family Album
"It was there," Trent Parke says, "while staring into that bright red bucket, vomiting every hour on the hour for 15 hours straight - that I started to think how strange families, suburbia, life, vomit and, in particular, Christmas really was..."
So began Trent's latest series, THE CHRISTMAS TREE BUCKET.
There Stands The Glass, Conor O'Brien
Sunset. Blankets. Holidays. Heartbreak. Conor O'Brien's images are warm like your towel after a swim; silent like eye contact across the room; awkward like your fumbled first kiss.
Been here before? Sure, Sophia Coppola, Stephenie Meyer and even Bonds have been milking the aching beauty and banality of adolescence for years.
Games of Consequence, Polixeni Papapetrou
Return to the spontaneity, freedom, simplicity and escapism of childhood with Polixeni Papapetrou's cinematic images of self-determined young girls at play.
With the landscape of rural Australia as a recurring backdrop - representing a space full of possibility and devoid of constraints - the artist is drawing on childhood memories of unregimented play, and the times she spent with friends outside the home discovering worlds beyond her own.
Our Future Was Ours, Darren Sylvester
With titles like ‘If It Hasn't Happened For You', ‘Maybe It Never Will' or ‘Learn To Adjust', ‘Learn To Get Over It', many assume Melbourne photographer Darren Sylvester is drawing on angst or pessimism, but he insists he's just being realistic...
Art people try to say I'm giving some hidden meaning or critique, but my images are straightforward.
The Fruiting Body, Nathan Gray
Explosive, celebratory and flamboyant, there's also an eeriness to Melbourne artist Nathan Gray's strange creations - the latest of which can be seen in his solo show, opening at Black & Blue this Thursday.
Showcasing his brightly coloured impromptu assemblages that incorporate sculpture, screen-printing and drawing, THE FRUITING BODY pays tribute to the handmade, fleeting, improvised and accidental.
The Descendants
W.C. Fields once said, "never work with children or animals," but he was a strange man. Petrina Hicks works with both, and she does it well. She's a master of ambiguity - traversing lines between truth and falseness, perfection and imperfection, innocence and cynicism.
With starkly simple compositions, flat antiseptic lighting and extensive digital manipulations, her subjects are impossibly neat, excessively flawless, and somehow dehumanised.
Neverness, Part 1
I trust you are familiar with NowNow, TwoThousand's sophisticated, worldly cousin? You may have spotted him at a Right Angle family get together, propped against a window sill sipping at a snifter of port, calmly snapping off the odd shot on his Contax while TwoThousand gets wasted on fruit punch and plays charades with the kids.
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