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Olafur Eliasson's work provides a sensory and dispersive experience for the viewer; elements such as light, air, fog, water, and even sound are employed in his installations and public art projects. The artist is influenced by both the built environment and natural elements, and his artistic practice moves between the public and private sectors. Eliasson has previously completed commercial works for Louis Vuitton and BMW.

The New York City Waterfalls was commissioned by the Public Art Fund and includes four monumental waterfalls located beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, between Brooklyn's Piers 4 and 5, at Lower Manhattan's Pier 35, and one on the north shore of Governors Island. The water plunges 90-120 feet, and can be seen from land and water (ferry tours are available). The falls are constructed of scaffolding, a ubiquitous New York City material, and were built by a team of engineers, architects, and ecologists. Filters protect wildlife and the falls run on green energy provided by ConEd. When viewed from the harbor, the water gently mists over the viewer and the loud roar of cascading water is heard. New York harbor has been a gateway to immigrants for centuries, and the artist has stated, "I hope to evoke experiences that are both individual and enhance a sense of collectivity."

Eliasson's previous projects include The Weather Project at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2003. The installation, which included a giant sun made of 200 yellow lamps, mirrors and mist attracted over 2 million visitors during its five month run.

The New York City Waterfalls will be de-installed on October 13th and 90% of all materials will be re-used in construction projects. A map of vantage points, boat schedules, and suggested bike routes are available at www.nyc.gov.

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Zheng Guogu's sculptural work often pairs confounding idioms, layering ephemeral qualities with imposing materials, in order to poetically arrange forms that operate on both a tactile and symbolic level. In his sculpture, Waterfall, Gougu pours white melted wax over a rigid metal armature, embedding calligraphic scripts into this serene fountain. Gougu both reinforces and freezes the progression of time, in an allegorical fashion not unlike the symbolism of burning candles, skulls, or rotting fruit prevalent in Dutch Renaissance still lives.

Evocative of natural forms on multiple levels, from snow-capped trees, mountainous landscapes, to icicle-like forms, Gougu creates an enigmatic presence, both familiar and foreign. The piece's somber, haunting aura is reinforced by the fact that white is traditionally a symbol of mourning in China. Lyrically composed, the piece acts as an abstract Memento Mori of sorts - reminding the viewer of his or her own mortality and the impermanence of life.

Zheng Gougu was born in Yangjiang, Guangdong province, China and lives and works in Yangjiang, Guangdong province. He has shown at the Venice Biennale, and was one of the few Chinese artists to participate in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. Last year, he was exhibited in The Real Thing: contemporary art from China (2007) at the Tate Modern in Liverpool. He has also shown at the Mori Museum in Tokyo and Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou, China.

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Jesse Bercowetz has a huge mobile on display at The Happy Lion in Chinatown. His solo exhibition, which is the New York artist's first on the West Coast runs until October 11th, flaunts several works, but the luminary piece-- and the real reason for going-- is the behemoth, nearly room-sized installation entitled The Pale Memory of Man. The roomy gallery space, usually noted for its high ceilings and the natural light that bounces off the white walls, is shown no mercy by The Pale Memory of Man. The over sized mixed media mobile looks like something that Tim Burton would create for one of his sets, and the ramshackle construction rivals that of a child's fort. However, once the casual onlooker absorbs the grandiose scale of the piece, a more engrossed observation will reveal the many intriguing idiosyncrasies of this mysterious black contraption of scavenged wood, polystyrene, plaster, glass, electric fans, foam core, paint, and capriciously hanging photos and notes. For one thing, the shape of this particular mobile is less hanging-above-a-baby's-bed and more springing violently from the framework of an oil derrick. Aside from the obvious, and timely, conversation about oil and energy consumption, the interesting juxtaposition for me is the implied permanence that the oil derrick represents in general, as compared with the seemingly intentional shoddiness of the construction of the piece.

Jesse Bercowetz is a graduate of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Selected exhibitions include: The Brooklyn Museum, NY, The Drawing Center, NY, White Columns, NY, PS1 / MoMA, NY, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin and Derek Eller Gallery, NY. This month he will present a new large-scale sculpture in the exhibition Next Wave At The Brooklyn Academy of Music, curated by Dan Cameron. There will be an installation of his collaborative work at Mass MoCA in 2009. Bercowetz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Vivid, Tofer Chin's current exhibition at Commissary Arts in Los Angeles, doesn't look like it's about sex, even though the works' titles and the press release explicitly reference gender, sexuality and adolescent ambivalence. Yet maybe the best thing about Chin's work is that it asks us to reassess the way we associate psychological and bodily phenomena with graphics.



Chin's paintings occupy the place where decorative and minimal meet hipster, where grids and lines start to become fun instead of austere. The fetish-finish majesty of Confirmation, the largest painting in the small gallery, seems a warped redress of color field painting, its big blue rays shooting up past the skewed checkered background into a pastel-colored halo. Yet putting Chin's work into an art historical narrative seems somehow wrong. Ultimately, he's more interested in the here and now.



Chin starts his work at the computer, experimenting with perspective and color. When he translates his digital manipulations into paint, the interaction between his sleekly composed images and the tactile nature of paint emphasizes that strange disconnect between systematics and visceral, bodily sensations. Chin, who graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002, has recently exhibited at Fecal Face Dot Gallery in San Francisco, Ad Hoc Art in Brooklyn, and Rojo Artspace in Barcelona. Vivid continues through October 25th.

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Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is also a professor of fine art at UCLA. Opie's work has been featured in acclaimed exhibitions in the United States and Europe. She has had solo exhibitions at, and which traveled to, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Orange County Museum of Art in California, The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Photographers' Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as well as at Regan Projects in Los Angeles and Gladstone Gallery in New York.

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AIKO opened a solo exhibition of recent works at Brooklynite Gallery on September 13th with live music by Soul Sonic Force. The exhibition, entitled Shut Up & Look, will remain at the gallery until October 11, 2008. AIKO combines a mastery of stenciling with brushwork and spray paint to emulate the urban decay of her street works. She creates city sirens, whose seductive glances and poses captivate the viewer, exploring female identity and sexuality. AIKO recently departed from the artist collective Faile, where she was a founding member.

AIKO moderated Brooklyn Museum's Visual Release: Gender, Art, Representation and Exchange as part of the museum's Love and Pop symposium and was a guest speaker at Envisioning Japan: Creative Dialogues with the Wider World during the Murakami symposium. She has also exhibited with Lady Pink in PINK/AIKO: Brick Ladies of NYC.

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In addition to the exhibition, 73 Funshine serves as a launch for Jagel's new monograph book (also titled 73 Funshine), which features over 200 colored pages of work dating back to 1997, most of which is musically oriented. Music is a strong driving force behind Jagel's artwork. The book and exhibition include Jagel's colorful palette and multifaceted paper canvases which demonstrate his "fictional autobiography". His use of gauche, pen, ink, and pencil creates a diaspora of dimension-optical diversions which exist side by side one another, and the viewer is invited into the delightfully dizzy scenes of Jagel's conception. Cityscapes, people (generally himself or those close to him), nature, and text are common images found in Jagel's work, themes which he states are narrating his fictitious life story. His aesthetic shows Guston-esque influence with overtly exaggerated brush strokes, the use of hands and smoke. In addition to painting and drawing, Jagel creates paper sculptures and site-specific installations. He has also produced album covers for such notable musicians as Madlib and MF Doom.

Jagel currently lives and works in San Francisco and has shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe. He is simultaneously showing at Los Angeles' Richard Heller Gallery. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts and his MFA from Stanford University.

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On September 13th, Julia Fullerton-Batten opened her first American solo show titled In Between at the Randall Scott Gallery in Washington, D.C. This London based photographer has been gaining recognition over the past two years for her photographic series, which depict the struggle of adolescence. Julia Fullerton-Batten uses intense set design and photographs girls who are not professional models to enhance the uncomfortable and awkward teenage experience. In her previous body of work, Teenage Stories, the artist focuses on images of young girls in a miniature world. Her work addresses the emotional transition of young girls, focusing on the duality of childhood fantasy and the responsibility of adult life. Fullerton-Batten creates intense images representative of the emotional physical changes of teenage girls, portraying loneliness and awkwardness combined with playfulness and whimsy.

Fullerton-Batten was born in Germany, graduated from the Berkshire College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in London. She has recently shown with the Shanghi Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gallery Caprice Horn in Berlin, the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London. See more of her work in recent issues of Juxtapoz Magazine.

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On view now at Fette's Gallery in Culver City, California is new work by Switzerland-born artist Sandrine Pelletier in her first Los Angles solo exhibition, titled Insekts. The work featured is a continuation of the artist's investigation into universal childhood experiences, it's associated artifacts and memories, and the fables that are told to children in this pivotal learning period. The exhibition highlights these ideas through embroideries, sculptures, and lace cut-outs.

The artist currently lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland and Paris, France. She is a graduate of Ecole D'Arts Appliques and the University of Art and Design in Switzerland. Since, she has exhibited with the Levy Gallery in Brussels, Tsumori Chisato in Paris and Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, Switzerland, among other international galleries.

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An exhibition by Taryn Simon titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar opened recently at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. This body of work spans four years of photographs addressing public access to American private and restricted locations. The images include many current cultural references including governmental and religious spaces, depicting the supposedly open yet concealed duality of American culture. Simon's photos incorporate informative text that explains the subject and context to the viewer.

Her photos consistently depict the parts of American culture that remain out of view. Her previous body of work, the Innocents, documents the many cases of wrong conviction in the United States. These elaborately lit and staged portraits are filled with blank looks. In some cases, the former prisoners were shown with the people they were accused of victimizing. In interviews that accompanied the exhibition, the prisoners often questioned notions of justice and freedom. These photographs were shown internationally at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and the Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. Taryn Simon graduated from Brown University and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent shows have included exhibitions with the Whitney Museum and the Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt in 2007. Simon was also selected for the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2007 for this recent body of work.

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In 1986, 7 million people created a human chain as part of the Hands Across America campaign to raise money to fight homelessness and hunger. New York artist Matt Keegan wanted to respond to that event and, last spring, he took a road trip from New York to New Mexico, making sculptural casts of the hands of mayors and people he met along the way. His current solo exhibition at Anna Helwing Gallery, titled Now's the Time, includes those cast hands and explores the general correlations between what was going on in 1986 and the contemporary climate. Now's the Time opened in Los Angeles' Culver City on September 6th.

Keegan and Anna Helwing Gallery have also organized a series of events, including lectures and performances, to accompany the exhibition. Visit Anna Helwing Gallery online to get a full list of events and times.

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Currently on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina are two new installations by artists Jarod Charzewski and Loul Samater.

Occupying nearly the entire second floor of the gallery space is Scarp, an installation by Jarod Charzewski comprised of what appears to be thousands of neatly folded items of clothing. The carefully organized mass of clothing replicates a geological formation with exposed strata and reveals a synthetic and fabricated history. Charzewski received his MFA in Sculpture from the University of Minnesota and has since exhibited internationally with shows at Ace Art Inc. in Winnipeg, Canada and Trisolini Gallery in Athens, Ohio.

On the main floor of the gallery Loul Samater has created Diving Dunce, an environment that seems to reference a party with a mass of glitter and tinsel enclosed in an entirely pink room. The series of painterly sculptures which occupy the gallery are mysterious and seem to exist in early stages of decay. The viewer is left to question if they have suddenly become a participant or has the celebration already ended. Samater received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

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Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection opened last week at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, California. The exhibition includes 141 works by ninety-six different artists owned Mr. Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and art enthusiast, who holds one of the largest collections of contemporary Chinese artwork in the world. Mahjong demonstrates a span of Chinese history through the varied artworks (ranging in medium, subject matter, and aesthetic). The museum becomes a vessel for thematically separating ideas among the works, with six individual galleries, each dedicated to a different theme and subject. The exhibition is distinctive from other contemporary Chinese art exhibitions in that while includes works from the most popular Chinese artists of today, it also follows a history of artwork dating back to the 1970s (when China was in the midst of the Maoist Cultural Revolution).

The exhibition also includes film screenings of Chinese filmmakers (and artists), Ning Ying and Jia Zhangke. Mahjong will be on display at UC Berkeley's museum until January.

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After first being introduced to the artists dealing with the decades long conflict in Lebanon after seeing Walid Raad's Let's be Honest, the Weather Helped at MoMA's Color Chart exhibition earlier this year, I quickly learned that John Jurayj is among the other prominent artists involved in this global discussion. In his second solo show at Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, entitled Untitled (We Could Be Heroes), which opened September 6th and runs through October 25th, John Jurayj continues his dialog of discontent regarding the violent civil war through new works in nontraditional media. Jurayj exposes the "power players" in the Lebanese Civil War through Untitled (15 Men), his series of portraits of top-tier cohorts, including then PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. The unconventional portraits are made from gunpowder screened onto mirrored stainless steel, and scaled to the size of an official embassy portrait. The eyes of the portraits are left blank, revealing the mirrored surface underneath and creating the eerie sensation of looking at oneself while looking at each piece. Across the main gallery from the portraits are a series of paintings made on colored mirrored plexiglass, which seem to be color abstractions at first, but reveal imagery of attacks, explosions and the ruins of real estate caught in the battles. 

John Jurayj lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his MFA at Bard College in New York in 2005. He is currently in the "New Acquisitions" show at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum of Art in D.C. He had a solo show at Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York City in the fall of 2007. Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at the Alberto Peola Gallery in Turin, Italy, opening November 2008 and a group show at Hafriyat Karakoy in Istanbul, Turkey, opening October of 2008.

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Australian artist Sally Smart is known for her large-scale collage installations applied directly to the gallery wall. She works with a range of media, including painted felt cut-outs, painted canvas, photographic elements, and printed fabric. The pins and joins that connect her work remain exposed to the viewer, emphasizing the performative process Smart undergoes in the collection, cutting, drawing, assembly, and installation of her work. The complexity and detail of each formal element engage the viewer in a search for recognizable elements and meaning.

Postmasters in New York is currently showing three of Smart's collage cut-out works in Decoy Nest, also the title of the show's centerpiece. Decoy Nest, seen above, occupies the main gallery wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling at a monumental 15x33 feet. The decoy nest is a strategy that birds use to deflect attention from their eggs. Smart says thinking about this idea led her to "draw connections to [her] art practice, in the strategies [she] used in conveying and creating meaning." Decoy Nest is accompanied by two other collage cut-outs, Twilight Tree and Phantom (limb) Tree.

Smart currently lives and works in Melbourne. She received her M.F.A. from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne and has exhibited widely in Australia and around the world. Decoy Nest will remain at Postmasters until October 11, 2008.

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Apocrypha is the title of a new exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Sean Higgins. The exhibition, which opened Saturday evening at OKOK Gallery in Seattle, features fourteen new digitally manipulated prints, all of which have been appropriated from the NASA image archives. Higgins continues the ambiguity found in his previous series of work, but now hones in on the inherent mystery of certain NASA images, further pushing the nature of perceived truth as he meticulously manipulates images of vast clouds, shuttle launches, and space equipment. The result is an entirely new fiction, one that contains infinite narrative possibilities for the viewer.

Sean Higgins received his MFA from The University of Pennsylvania and since the late nineties has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions including shows with Sixspace and Rogue Wave '05 at the LA Louver Gallery, both in Los Angeles, California.

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Currently on view at the Deitch Project's Long Island City warehouse gallery is a massive new installation by artist Swoon. As a printmaker, sculptor and installation artist, Swoon's exhibition Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, features countless objects and images that reference urban decay and the darker, albeit romantic, side of city life. However, the installation is only a one part of the exhibition. Swoon, directing a crew of over seventy-five collaborators, also created seven full size boating vessels which set sail on down the Hudson River on August 15th and landed on Deitch Projects via the East River for the first time on Sunday September 7th. A crowd of hundreds welcomed the ships, and the combined crew of 40, as the band Dark, Dark, Dark played in the middle of the excited crowd.

Swoon began her artistic career as we know it today producing works on the streets of New York City. Since, the artist has exhibited internationally and collaborated with groups Glowlab, Black Label and the Barnstormers. Her work has been featured at PS1and in several exhibition with Deitch Projects.

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One of the fathers and pioneers of the American Urban Art movement, born out of New York City's late 70's and early 80's graffiti heyday is the legendary artist Futura. Opening this weekend in Los Angeles will be a four day event and exhibition featuring the artist and his new works in what will be the artists first ever solo show in LA, titled KRUNK. The exhibition, which was previous listed to be in an sercret location has been stated to be held in Downtown Los Angeles on the corner of 6th and Main.

Futura, also known as Furtura 2000, has developed an international career over the past 30 years working as a prolific artist, illustrator, graphic designer, and custom toy designer. He as worked with companies such as Phillie Blunt, Zoo York, and Nike.

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Opening this evening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at Dam Stuhltrager Gallery will be a two person exhibition featuring the work of Chris Coffin and Jonathan Brilliant. Coffin's show New Work Off Dry Land, features a 300 ft line of bouys that have been actively used by lobster fisherman in Newport, Rhode Island. The artist strapped the line to his body and carried out a performance in which he swam in the ocean with the line trailing behind him. Coffin received his MFA from Pratt Institute and has been featured in The New York Times and Addict Magazine. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jonathan Brilliant, whose work is pictured above, has created his latest installation featuring thousands of coffee house stir sticks that are woven together and held by tension only. The Goldsworthy of The Coffee Shop Project presents organic and formalist sculptures which cleverly create a dialogue between a natural and consumer-based landscape. The artist also illustrates the possibilities inherent in a simple object once multiplied and arranged by the thousands. Brilliant received his MFA from San Jose State University. He has recently exhibited at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC and the Elliot Center Gallery at the University of North Carolina. Brilliant currently lives and works in Charleston, SC.

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Miju, the artist collaboration of Michele Muennig and Juan Carlos Quintana, is currently exhibiting at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco. Though the work of the collaboration is thought out and purposeful, a clear dialogue of spontaneity exists among the paintings. Each artist adds his and her own artistic technique while collectively they maintain a polished aesthetic of drawing and painting. In their show, Effigies and Demagogues, the San Francisco-based artists reveal themes of destiny, nature, delight and desire, the subjects of fairy tales, and political and historical figures. Muennig's own imagery borders on the surreal, where freely associated objects, characters, and themes (femininity being a focal point) powder her vibrantly colored canvases. Quintana's work shows the influence of political satire, his latino ethnicity, as well as youth and classic children stories.

Both Michele Muennig and Juan Carlos Quintana were educated at Tulane University in New Orleans and have shown extensively as solo artists, though they are making a name for themselves as a collaborative throughout the Bay Area. They have have also exhibited as a duo at art fairs in Miami and New York as well as a recent show in Quezon City, Philippines. The paintings of Miju can be seen at Jack Fischer Gallery until September 27.

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Deitch Projects' 18 Wooster St. Gallery is currently exhibiting a new installation by artist Chris Johanson. Totalities in the title of the new show which has been described as a "contemporary living installation" that includes plants, animals, and people as well as more traditional paintings and sculpture. The artist, who is known for works that are inspired from his own life, has decided to simultaneously focus on the macro and micro, meditating on the planet's position in the universe as well as the natural world of earth. Most of the material for show has been found or salvaged near the artist's Brooklyn studio or from friends and fellow artists.

Johanson currently lives and works in New York City and San Francisco. In addition to Deitch Projects, the artist has also exhibited with Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco and Georg Kargl Fine Art in Vienna, Austria.

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Diamonds and Rust is a new exhibition which opened just last night in Los Angeles, as the debut solo exhibition for the artist Sarah Cromarty with Circus Gallery. The artist's paintings reflect "new visions of the American landscape and American Dream. She brings her simmering and dreamy ideas and style to cowboys, ravers, motorcycle riders, sports cars, and Los Angeles." The exhibition acts in part autobiographically, as she uses images of herself and ex-lovers within the work, while also carefully referencing elements of art historical painting through appropriation and defacement.

The artist is a BFA graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California and has recently exhibited with Sixspace, High Energy Constructs and The Balmoral, all in Los Angeles. The artist currently lives and works in LA.

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Paul Campbell and Dominic Paul Moore are currently showing recent work at the Moreau Art Galleries at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana in an exhibition entitled Profile Me. Both artists use popular virtual community sites to examine contemporary portraiture and personality.

Campbell creates oil on canvas figurative portraits based on Facebook users' self-appointed profile pictures. His energetic canvases cause the viewer to evaluate an individual's desire to portray a personality through a single image. The artist states, "they're essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online."

Moore's work has a rather morbid premise. The artist utilizes the site MyDeathSpace.com, an archival site of obituaries of MySpace members with links to their profiles. His gouache and graphite photo-realistic drawings mirror the virtual profiles that continue to exist after the life of the user has passed, creating a slightly haunting posthumous profile. The above image, Mandii, provides an artistic memento mori while bringing the viewer face to face with Mandii's mortality and the immortality of the Internet. MySpace has previously been included in both Time Magazine and PC World's rankings of the worst web sites to visit, a conceptual catapult for this particular body of work.

Profile Me will remain at the Hammes Gallery at the Moreau Art Galleries until September 26, 2008.

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Opening next week at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art will be works by artist David Shrigley in his latest self titled exhibition. Shrigley is best known for his dead pan humor and intuitive drawings that illustrate simple yet absurd situations. The exhibition will also feature the artists object-based sculpture, which often plays with scale and have included items such as stuffed animals, doors, ladders, tents and sleeping bags. The artists has exhibited internationally and gained much popularity through a series of weekly illustrative contributions to The Guardian, since 2005. Shrigley has exhibitions this year with BQ in Cologne, Anton Kern Gallery in NYC and CASM in Barcelona, and a forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris next year.

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Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington is currently hosting new installation works by Indigenous-Australian artist Jonathan Jones. Untitled (The Tyranny of Distance), 2008 is positioned within the main exhibition space and is composed of a series of six blue tarpaulin covered walls, each extending to over eight meters in length. Each of them radiate with light from fluorescent tubes positioned to make arrow like chevron patterns. The audience is not allowed access between the walls, and are instead allowed only to move around the perimeter of the installation. This makes reference to the Australian government's 2006 intervention of the Northern Territory's Aboriginal community, raising issues of land ownership and civil rights. Positioned outside the gallery space is Jones' installation Genesis, 2008. Comprising of a series of stacked emu eggs illuminated by florescent light, this work also makes reference to indigenous issues as a symbol of traditional art and new life.

Jones is of the Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri people of South Eastern Australia. He has worked as a curator for Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative; the only Aboriginal owned and operated contemporary art space in Sydney. He has received numerous awards for his art practice including the 2002 New South Wales Indigenous Artists Fellowship and the 2006 Xstrata Emerging Indigenous Art Award. He currently lives and works in Sydney, while acting as a museum educator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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A new collection of works by Sydney artist Noel McKenna are currently on display at Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo. Entitled The Weekly Bus-Rail Ticket: The Return Journey, the series depicts scenes of Sydney life, some as momentous as Anthony Mundine claiming the Middleweight Championship of the World, while others such as Kambala School Girl portray the more seemingly mundane aspects of city life. Depictions of cityscapes, oversized vehicles on suburban roads, children dressed in designer fashion and grand residencies of Sydney businessmen also make an appearance within the show. While most take form as works on canvas, Sydney Chair of Influence, embroidered with the names of prominent community figures, acts as a sculptural inclusion to the exhibition.

McKenna lives and works in Sydney. He has studied at various Australian institutions including The University of Queensland, Brisbane College of Art and Alexander Mackie College. His work has been exhibited on an international scale within galleries including John Batten Gallery, Hong Kong, Bowen Galleries, New Zealand and Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. He has won numerous awards for his art practice including the 2006 Fleurieu Peninsula Vistas Prize, the 2003 Mosman Art Prize and the Wynne Prize for Watercolour in 2001, 2002 and 2005.

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