Lismore City Council has announced the official reopening of the Lismore Regional Gallery on Friday, 27 September, from 6pm.
After extensive renovations following the floods, the Gallery will be welcoming visitors to its transformed building when it opens in spring. The reopening program across the five galleries highlights the diverse and extensive artistic talent from the region and beyond.
The official reopening celebration on 27 September will feature performances, installations, music, and catering for all to enjoy. Across the weekend of 28-29 September there will be workshops, artist talks, and musical performances.
Gallery Director Ashleigh Ralph said she’s looking forward to welcoming visitors to celebrate and once again share this building that represents the heart of creativity in the region.
‘The opening weekend will be pivotal in our recovery after the 2022 natural disaster,’ she said.
‘We are galvanised by the excitement of our audience and colleagues in the region and across the country. We are looking forward to opening our doors as one of the longest-running cultural organisations in Northern NSW.
‘Lismore Regional Gallery will continue to host major touring exhibitions and deliver an innovative and attentive self-generated program of exhibitions and events that stimulate and engage audiences locally and nationally,’ said Ms Ralph.
Lismore Mayor Steve Krieg said the long-anticipated re-opening of the Lismore Regional Gallery was another welcomed milestone in the city’s and community’s recovery.
‘This is great news for our community,’ he said. ‘The popularity of the pop-up gallery while this one was being repaired, really underlined the importance of art within our community, both in an artistic sense but also importantly our mental wellbeing.’
Reopening exhibition program
- The ArtHitects Gary Carsley and Renjie Teoh: Hannah Halle
Using only an office copier and reams of A4 paper the ArtHitects create immersive installations at the confluence of their separate practices as artist and architect. Hannah Halle, a new commission for Lismore Regional Gallery, is confabulated from over 4,000 individual A4 prints to symbolically reimagine the prized Hannah Cabinet by Geoffrey Hannah OAM. The prints will be applied ritualistically to the gallery walls in the weeks leading up to the exhibition opening, providing a multi-perspectival mise en scène featuring works from a diverse group of invited artists and creatives in the Northern Rivers. - Buruugaa Garaa Buruu Garaa Budgeramgali (Saltwater people Freshwater people stories)
Co-curated by Melissa Ladkin, Buruugaa Garaa Buruu Garaa Budgeramgali features Amrita Hepi, Joshua Lynch, and Djon Mundine OAM, with a live performance by Waangenga Blanco. This exhibition is a dynamic exploration of spiritual and customary living relationships with water. Through individual screen dances, spoken word and musical composition, each artist takes the audience on a journey, offering a fluid narrative that showcases the dynamic diversity of water and how it connects us. - Nell Pearson and Matthew Brooks: Blue island
Meeting at art school in Melbourne, Nell and Matthew have since become life partners, sharing their home, studio, and, more recently, parenthood. They live and work in the Northern Rivers, where they continue a lifelong conversation about art and carry out their painting practices side by side and sometimes together. In the domestic space, small gestures of the everyday entangle with artmaking so that the making and the living happen on the same plane. This exhibition celebrates two distinct visual languages, which, like trees in a forest standing apart but whose roots are entangled, share a private intimacy.
Max McAuley, Sprung News (detail) 2024. Courtesy Jorge Serra and Sprung Ensemble. - Sprung!! Ensemble: Sprung News
Sprung News investigates how accessible/inaccessible media and emergency information can be to the disability community, using photography, video, and audio to express diverse perspectives and representations. Our news is not boring. We tell the truth and we wear what we want. If it’s breakfast news then we actually eat breakfast. It makes sense. You can understand it. We tell it in a different way. Did you know that floods have stories too? Or didn’t you bother asking them? Who else didn’t you ask? - Chloe Smith: Unbearable Incandescence
Unbearable Incandescence presents a series of works interrogating the paradoxical search for reality in a world of simulation and appearance. Through a series of hyperreal textile works, sculptor Chloe Smith unravels the cruel optimism of certainty and the truths we must ultimately craft for ourselves. A birthday cake awaits its single sumptuous moment. An absurdly large bunch of asparagus stands proudly phallic, valorised on a broken plinth. The lines between reality and the surreal blur beyond recognition, where the serious is suddenly silly, where memories become fiction and fiction becomes a memory.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
