An evocative collection of works by Dutch photo-journalist, Robert Knoth is currently on show at The Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. Entitled Certificate no. 000358/ Nuclear Devastation in the Former Soviet Union, this display highlights the devastating consequences of radiation, by photographing the affected victims. Case studies include the Patuchenko sisters who both suffer from brain tumours, Vadim Kuleshov- an eight year old mentally retarded boy with bone disease and Nastya Eremenko a young girl who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at only three years old.

Knoth has been photographing these subjects in black and white since the early nineties, continuing to make us aware of the repercussions experienced by such innocent victims. He names each photo after the people depicted, followed by where they are from. When noticing all the different countries included, we are able to see just how far spread the devastation really lies.

Knoth studied at the Urecht School of Arts over the duration of a year before earning his way as a rock photographer in the early nineties. He has since documented various war torn destinations including Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

Certificate No.000358/ is a global traveling exhibition, which is estimated to have already been viewed by over 200,000 people. It is set to travel to Queensland and South Australia next.

ZHANG Huan Untitled 1/2 1998 type C photograph Private collection, Melbourne. Copyright Zhang Huan

Coinciding with the politically fueled Beijing Olympics, Body Language: Contemporary Chinese Photography is currently on show at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. A collaborative exhibition consisting of works by seven Chinese artists, Body Language focuses on the human form while fusing contemporary art forms with traditional iconography, representing China’s changing society.

Zhang Huan‘s Shanghai Family Tree series uses the body as a canvas for calligraphy; Huang Yan paints traditional mountainous scenery upon torsos while Liu Wei‘s Landscape photographs use black and white images of contorted figures to resemble hanging scrolls. Within Chi Peng‘s evocative Consubstantiality series, gender boundaries are blurred, while Wang Qingsong‘s triptych Preincarnation depicts figures dressed as ancient statues with missing limbs.

Artist Sheng Qi is said to have cut off his own left pinky finger in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He then buried it in a flowerpot, leaving it in China while he fled to Europe. His Memories series, which appears in Body Language, portrays his disfigured hand holding a photo of himself, his mother and Mao. Qi studied at The Central Academy of Art and Design, Beijing and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design, London. He has exhibited widely on an international scale at places including N.O. Gallery, Milan, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.

SpY is an urban interventionist working in Madrid. His artistic practices range from interventions to objects, films, and urban furniture. His works include placing brown bags, black hats, and buckets over public statues across the city. SpY fabricates quizzical objects such as a lamp made out of an orange cone and a Rubik’s cube with all white squares subtitled For the Lazy Person. Red Nose captures him placing a red nose on a billboard and a different clip, seen above, features him rolling thick black streaks of paint over another large street sign. Each takes place in midday and is accompanied by a jazzy upbeat background score, characteristic of the artist’s playful and pleasing reappropriation of the city’s fundamental iconography. SpY has been known to place urban furniture throughout Madrid such as his Yellow Fence. He has also positioned over-sized pencils along the M-30, a Madrid peripheral ring road, in Paint Your City. SpY replicates and alters this street imagery and installs his new creation, always in a non-invasive and amusing manner.

SpY’s first actions began appearing in the mid 1980s. He began as a graffiti artist and later experimented with other forms of artistic production in the street, creating large posters and modifying billboards. His pieces are based on years of urban observation and exist to break the mechanized motions of the modern urban dweller. The contexts for the works are always carefully chosen, and his works themselves always spontaneous and ironic, opening artistic communication in the street for anyone who wants to join.

SpY has been reviewed by Serie B magazine and an interview with SpY by Subaquatica can be found online.

Peak Gallery in Toronto presents Susy Oliveira‘s first solo exhibition at the gallery, The Girl and The Bear. Oliveira graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2000 and holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She currently lives and works in Toronto.

The Girl and the Bear includes three photographic sculptures, one collage series and one print. The girl and the bear, composed of C-prints on archival card and foamcore, is shown above, and comments on our reproduction of nature. The artist’s intent is to form a simulated reality to remind us of our habit of replacing the natural world with our own fabricated versions. She mentions the garden in her artist statement, a domestic metaphor for things we create composed of organic elements, but for our own enjoyment.

In Oliveira’s three dimensional works, there exists a playful dynamic between the flat characteristics of photography and the round aspects inherent to sculpture. Their angular rendering recalls computer graphics from the 1980s or an over-sized origami project. Her collages depict outdoor scenes and are perforated with various sizes of cuts. In her photographic print, she placed holes in the sky, allowing real sunlight to shine through.

Oliveira has exhibited at Niagara Gallery and A.W.O.L. Gallery in Toronto and has been reviewed by NOW Magazine and ECHO Weekly. The Girl and The Bear will remain at Peak Gallery until April 26, 2008.

There is a long history of art being presented along side fashion. These exhibitions have left one with the feeling that the art is being used to lend conceptual weight to the clothes. But the rigorous exhibitions mounted at Antwerp’s Fashion Museum makes it clear that fashion designers can be as conceptually strong as visual artists. Their current exhibition is an overview of fashion designer Veronique Branquinho. She graduated from Flanders Fashion Institute in 1995. Since 1998, she has shown her collections on the world’s fashion runways, but this is the first museum presentation of her creative output.

With this exhibition, Branquinho leads us on an expansive journey. Upon entering the exhibition, the sound of your shoes is amplified, by the gravel on the floor of the darkened forest room where her shoe collections come to light hanging from the trees. Past a moving video installation, the viewer is lead through an empty chamber that functions as a Bruce Nauman Absorbing Chamber, circa 1983. Another room is outfitted with a jukebox playing cool club music. It’s like a Jeff Koons icon to American pop culture. Clearly, Branquinho knows her art history. Dark evening wear is presented, revealing her passion for combining different materials that layer and drape to accentuate the female form. The procession here leads from dark, to the darker, and then there is light.

For this trip, Branquinho provides an overcoat for the discerning man, along with a Porsche outfitted in matching tweed, both inside and out. Presented along with a video of a car racing through the open desert, we’re finally ready to go. The desert provides the metaphor of endless openness as we head forward into our unknown future. At least we can be well dressed for the surprises that await us. Finally, bursting into the light, with the stunning beauty that a clear vision can provide. Visual artists take note; creative thought will lead us, as we head into the excitement of the unknown.

Veronique Branquinho at Modemuseum Provincie Antwerpen, through August 17th.

The group exhibition “The Ice Cream Show” at Loyal Gallery features artists Francine Spiegel, Katherine Bernhardt, Brian Belott, Brendan Cass, Jose Lerma, Bill Saylor, Mark Schubert, Cordy Ryman, and Guillermo Carrion, and emphasizes fluidity and the love of leaking and dripping. At some point, everyone has been fascinated by putting plastic in fire and watching it melt, cooking a s’more, or seeing ice cream liquefy under the sun. These sloppy gooey messes are portrayed by nine artists who capture the sprawling element inherent in these mutable conditions and poetically translate them into paint and other artist materials. The resulting works appear as if they are under the force of excessive gravity or as if they have just weathered a storm.

Francine Spiegel works with photocollages, videos, mixed media assemblages, and freeform installations, as seen above. Her imagery is derived from feminine cyber subcultures and techno debris found on her studio floor. She combines this imagery with other found raw materials to present a massive eruption of color, paint, and texture. Spiegel graduated with a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and has exhibited at the Silo Galelry and Deitch Projects in New York as well as Millicent Gallery in LA.

“The Ice Cream Show” opening will be held on April 11th from 6-9 with special guest DJ Konichiwa Bitches and the show will remain at Loyal Gallery until May 25th.

Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art presents Kate Shaw in “Redux”, opening on April 15th in Sydney. Shaw paints landscapes that waver between pictorial illusion and complete abstraction and evoke images of the alpine wilderness and tropical jungles. The bottom half of her compositions is devoted to watery reflections, displaying a distinct Rorschach effect. She uses a cool pastel palette which varies between gentle washes of color and areas of dramatic saturation to create beautiful yet foreboding environments, inevitably awakening our own environmental consciouses and fears of global warming. Her landscapes are uninhabited, representing a time when nature has regained her control over mankind and lending a sense of apocalyptic immediacy. The artist describes her paintings as “disaster scenarios kind of…but only a disaster for humanity..”.

Shaw graduated from RMIT University in Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts and then completed a Diploma of Museum Studies at Deakin University in 1997. She has exhibited in Australia and internationally, at Luxe Gallery in New York and at the Glendale College Art Gallery in Los Angeles. She had a solo exhibition at SSFA in 2007 and recently finished a studio residency in Brooklyn, New York.

“Redux” will be at Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art until May 4th.