March is an exciting time to visit Ballina’s Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG).
Four new solo-exhibitions from local artists will convey changing perspectives on landscape, climate change, metamorphosis of plant species, and migration and transgenerational trauma.
In Separate Realities, Byron Bay local watercolourist, Dave Sparkes, distills and condenses essential elements of the landscape, using nuances of light and shadow, to convey the essence of a place at certain times.
‘There is no absolute reality,’ Sparkes says.
‘There are only different perspectives, and if you alter these, the average, everyday landscape can be transformed into the most magical place.’
The Ice Cohabitation exhibition, also at NRCG, will feature images captured by Louise Grayson during an expedition to the Antarctic.
The images explore the natural dance between animals and their environment, as the shadow of human intervention and a warming environment, begins to stretch across this ice wonderland.
The exhibition asks the question, can this ice environment, with its multitude of species, survive in the augmented race by humans for control of nature’s final frontier?
Mia Forrest’s BLOOM exhibition features artworks depicting Australian native flowers, hybridize time, technology, and nature.
Surreal stretching flowers bloom upward, embodying re-imagined cosmic forms and shapes, planting botanicals within a digital context using time expanding techniques, immortalizing the otherwise impermanent and ephemeral nature of plants.
As the flowers transform and bloom, they form a DNA-like helix structure, inviting the audience to contemplate how species morph, change, survive, and thrive over time.
Last but by no means least, Tracing Threads: across emotional landscapes of self features Katie Alleva’s new body of work, which zigzags through the family archives exploring the life of her Italian ancestors ‘pre-migration to post migration’.
Alleva is interested in uncovering how trauma affects emerging emotional cultural identities. Raising awareness of the impact of conflict on culture and society, the artist investigates displacement and intergenerational trauma.
