All are welcome to the official opening of four new exhibitions at Lismore Regional gallery this Friday evening, with live music and a talk from Melbourne artist Sarah Ujmaia.
The four shows are:
Colour : gentle awareness. Colour theory is a key concern in the multi-decade practice of Narmada Smith. Across time she has recognised that the observation of vivid colour is elevating to the consciousness of the viewer and is a means for transformation. Looking at art slowly, while reflecting on the relationships between colour, form and composition, evokes an instinctive visceral experience.
Smith believes this alertness frees the viewer to look, think and breathe, initiating an unfolding of gentle awareness. Smith’s practice is underpinned by an enduring obsession with the sensory impact of colour, and its links to modern art practice and Indian mysticism, having spent large parts of her life living in India.
Marmoreum (28°48’34.4”S 153°16’45.6”E), from Sarah Ujmaia. In the process of marble metamorphosis, sedimentary shell is subjected to heat, pressure, and time, structurally changing to become a fixed and valued rock.
Sarah Ujmaia’s installation has been conceived to have the material possibility of a marble floor, achieved through her production of mineral calcite (commonly known as chalk) from shell grit. Spatially the work is informed by the cobblestone paved market squares in northern Iraq—taking a standard yet irregular paver and hand casting its facsimiles to produce a floor.
In Marmoreum, the chalk floor invites the valuing of something that remains changing, locating us as active participants in the future of language, conceptually connecting the work to Ujmaia’s interest in the loss of written forms.
And her hallway moves like the ocean. Babette Robertson continues her ongoing investigation into the structures and residues of dreams in her solo exhibition And her hallway moves like the ocean.
Each work begins with a written account, then moves through watercolour studies that distill the logic, atmosphere, and shifting symbols of the dream state.
These fragments become the basis for large scale paintings and sculptural forms, treating dreams not as private stories but as shared symbols drawn from a collective unconscious. Robertson is interested in how dreams register and reshape the pressures of the present. Dreams do not look away. They distort, repeat, and insist that we confront what waking life often obscures.
The final show will be from the Lismore Regional Gallery Permanent Collection,
Recent acquisitions and restored works. LRG is gradually re-building its permanent Collection thanks to our generous donors through the Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
Lismore Regional Gallery Permanent Collection. Recent acquisitions and restored works.
This exhibition will share newly acquired works by some of Australia’s preeminent artists such as Hany Armanious, Lindy Lee, Lottie Consalvo, and Laith McGregor.
The exhibition will also celebrate existing Collection artworks by local and national artists, recontextualising them in the present day and in dialogue with the new works.
On Friday 12 June, the gallery’s doors will open at 5pm. Lismore regional Gallery curator Ineke Dane will be in conversation with Sarah Ujmaia at 5.30pm. At 6.15pm there will be a welcome to country and speeches, with live music from Northern Rivers Conservatorium from 6.30pm.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible, and this event will be Auslan interpreted.
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