The Lookout

By Carrie Miller

The latest group exhibition at the National Art School Gallery The Lookout brings together local and international artists around a theme of the social role of art, a theme with renewed currency in contemporary practice.

Anri Sala’s video Dammi I Colori connects to the question of how art intervenes in public life. Filmed in Tirana, the capital city of his homeland Albania, its subject is the radical public art program which transformed the city’s apartment buildings into a strange and vivid modernist cityscape.

Australian artist Locust Jones’s diaristic drawing practice is both local and global; it’s populated with the generic topics of the worldwide 24 hour news cycle and yet highly personal in the way he remixes content to comment on political issues. Jones’s continuous 100-metre drawing will gradually unfold during the exhibition like the relentless information cycle his work both mimics and subverts.

In contrast, Justine Varga’s photographs are instilled with a quiet potency beneath their fragile beauty that reflects the more introspective space of the domestic sphere – both the subject of her work and the place in which it’s created.

The Lookout presents the work of artists whose varied approaches demonstrate that art’s ability to communicate in different ways is not merely a function of cultural difference in a literal sense.

Until October 13

National Art School Gallery,

Darlinghurst

nas.edu.au/place/gallery