Latest news with #AGWA
Perth Now
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Dazzling new OTT exhibition launches at AGWA
Lilly Blue & Maxxi Minaxi May at the Maxxi Minaxi May exhibition opening at AGWA. Picture: Alan Chau / The West Australian Fun was the name of the game at the launch of Re-PLAY as everything from the colourful cake pop desserts, salt and vinegar potatoes with edible flowers and, of course, the vibrant Maxxi Minaxi May exhibition were created to surprise and delight. The launch was held in Gallery 09 inside The Art Gallery of Western Australia where guests were invited to explore while snacking on bites from Mi Scusi, and enjoying performances from the Perth Symphony Orchestra and acrobatics from Fliptease. In her speech, AGWA's Lilly Blue described Re-PLAY as a 'a delicious sensory and colour-rich playground, harnessing the arts of assemblage to examine consumerism, mass consumption and throwaway culture'.
West Australian
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
STM Loves: Houndsome, AGWA Pulse butterflies, Mettle, Propellis dinner, G Flip and Natal Nurture
If you're going to dress your dog, it might as well be in something that actually feels good, looks good and does good. Melbourne label Houndsome keeps things simple with natural fabrics, local makers and no fluff (unless it's merino). Their coats and knits are designed for comfort (not costumes) and are actually made in Australia. Dogwear with standards, we're into it! A fresh arrival to AGWA's Design Store are these beautifully embroidered brooches made by North Metropolitan TAFE fashion students, to celebrate The West Australian Pulse exhibition. Each butterfly was designed by hand before being made utilising state-of-the-art embroidery machines at the college. Proceeds from sales (each brooch retails for $65) go towards the students' end-of-year fashion runway shows. Just another way you can support emerging designers on WA soil. Shop in-store or online at . What would you do if you won 52 gifts? Brighten a friend's day in a time of need? Celebrate a birthday? Send one to your sister, just because? Whatever your choice, if you do win Mettle Women Inc's competition to receive a year's worth of free gifts, you will be helping women who have experienced homelessness due to domestic and family violence. To go into the running for the giveaway, purchase a gift from Mettle's new range, with each purchase going towards an entry. The competition runs until August 15. More details at . It's not always the food that makes a meal memorable, rather the experience or the stories shared about the dishes or the wine from the people who passionately created them. It's this sentiment that will make the Propellis dinner at Subiaco's Intuition extra special as each of the five courses and eight wine pairings will come with a story from Propellis' Romain Scarcella, who has immersed himself in the worlds of each wine's makers. The August 7 dinner is $260 per person. More details at New Perth-based business Natal Nurture is here to support mums through the often-overlooked 'fourth trimester'. Launched in June, it offers a 12-week online postpartum recovery program with physio-led workouts, expert interviews and practical resources to help women rebuild strength and confidence after childbirth. The program was created by local mum and pelvic health physiotherapist Phoebe, blending lived experience with professional insight. The program is on-demand so you can go at your own pace. Drummer-singer-songwriter G Flip is coming home to Australia on their Dream Ride tour, promising big pop hooks and even bigger feelings. The ARIA-winning artist's third album is being released on September 5 and is described as leaning 'deep into neon-lit 80s textures while staying rooted in G Flip's raw, confessional songwriting'. The tour, with Canadian four-piece The Beaches and Australian creative Ayesha Madon in support, will finish with a show at Fremantle Arts Centre on March 14. Tickets go on general sale on Monday July 21, via Oztix .
Perth Now
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Art Gallery of WA celebrates next generation of fashion designers in The West Australian Pulse
The next generation of WA fashion designers were greeted by a sellout crowd as they showed their creations in a high-energy runway show on Saturday night. The West Australian Pulse, the Art Gallery of WA's annual celebration of talent, passion and creativity, showcased the work of fashion and design students from North Metro TAFE, South Metro TAFE, Curtin and Edith Cowan universities. This year's catwalk parade was dedicated to the memory of fashion designer and AGWA collaborator Aurelio Costarella, who died in April. The fashion show, which featured WA's top fashion graduates and emerging names, is part of AGWA's annual celebration of art created by young people. It coincides with The West Australian Pulse visual arts exhibition, chosen from the best works submitted by Year 12 graduates. With the demise of Perth Fashion Festival in 2018, Pulse has become an essential annual runway experience for student designers. Around 115 student volunteers — including designers, dressers, apprentice hairdressers, makeup artists and ushers — rolled up their sleeves and donated their time backstage to help the show run smoothly.
ABC News
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Revivification at the Art Gallery of WA is a strange and tender revival of experimental composer Alvin Lucier
On a quiet Saturday morning in the heart of Perth, a crowd gathers inside the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), with the disoriented mood of any social event that takes place before noon. But there's also a sense of confusion about just what the mood should be. We are here, in theory at least, to listen to a performance by a dead composer who, beyond the dark, waiting tunnel of the exhibition entrance, is at least in some way physically present. Through the passageway is a "brain in a jar", curator Robert Cooke jokes, somewhat uneasily. It's part of an AGWA exhibition that makes a bold promise: to reawaken what has ceased to exist. Before the entrance, watching over the living, is a large photographic portrait of the late artist at the centre of AGWA's Revivification: the legendary American experimental composer, Alvin Lucier. For more than 50 years, until his death in 2021 at the age of 90, Lucier was a pioneering figure in electronic and electro-acoustic music. His work was often described as "making the inaudible audible". Lucier announced his artistic arrival in 1965 with his groundbreaking work 'Music for Solo Performer', which used then-cutting-edge technology to translate his brainwaves into sound on percussive instruments while he, the performer, sat still on a stage, eyes closed, electrodes attached to his head. This strange, speculative installation I'm standing before six decades on, feels like exactly the kind of thing Lucier might have created himself — if he'd lived long enough to make use of contemporary neuroscience that could, in effect, grow a brain outside of the human body. In Revivification, a collaboration between Australian artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, and Matt Gingold, along with neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts, the group attempts to bring Lucier back to life — not just metaphorically. They describe the work as an extension of Lucier's "cellular life". Inside a dark, cave-like chamber, 20 large brass plates line the walls. Behind each one sits a mallet connected to a motor, poised to respond to electrical activity from a miniature brain organoid: a cluster of neural cells, cultivated from white blood cells Lucier had donated before his death. The cells are alive. They are growing. Like a real brain, these neurons are communicating with one another. Using electrodes, the organoid's electrical activity is recorded and sonified — translated into sound — creating a feedback loop. In theory, the organoid could experience the sound vibrations it has helped to create and respond to them. The sound that results is some blend between the resonant tones of a temple, and a haphazard pitter-patter like a child on a drum set. At the centre of the chamber sits the organoid itself, sealed inside a box. Only one visitor at a time can peer down at it through a magnifying-glass porthole. The viewer in that moment has to alone contend with the question: What am I looking at? A hopeful, speculative dream, perhaps — that a person might indeed live on in some way after death, continuing to interact with the world, even continue to make art. Or, as Thompson puts it, were they peering into an "abyss": life, "but not of the same living experience"? The installation raises another question: even if we can continue a creative life after death, should we? The science behind Revivification is state of the art. But the feeling it evokes — the wonder and anxiety, the moral tension — is centuries old. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the obvious reference point. A work produced in another age of technological anxiety in the early part of the 19th century. Not unlike our present moment; the fears about scientific overreach in the context of AI, and the vulnerable place of the human in our rapidly changing world. And yet, beneath the speculative weight of Revivification lies something unexpectedly tender: a sense of deep affection. At its heart, the exhibition is also an act of homage. Four artists' love for an elder, and an unwillingness to let him go. In a panel following the opening, the artists speak with both humour and sincerity about the bonds they developed with each Petri dish of Alvin Lucier's cell tissue. "I had this really personal and emotional attachment to Dish 8," Gingold says to laughter, though he's serious. "Dish 8 had these really strong neural activations. "At some point, it got contaminated and there was one night where we knew it was going to die. And we were recording it. And it was really emotional because I could see these activations changing. I could see that it was going into these states where it was activating a lot and then dying back down. "It is something that is alive," Gingold says. "It's got a life of its own." In the final years of Lucier's life, the group spoke to him fortnightly via zoom. Before his death, Lucier's daughter, Amanda, told Guy Ben-Ary it was true to form that her father would agree to a project like Revivification. "She said, you know, it's so like him that at the end of his life, he's just organising a way to keep on composing." At one point speaking to me, Gingold strangles the word "spiritual" as he begins to speak it. Concepts of the transcendent or sublime have often seemed antithetical to the secular and scientific interests of experimental art. But Revivification has a strangely spiritual nature to its questions about the ineffability of creativity and where it might come from. In our increasingly disembodied age — where human creativity seems ever more threatened by non-human technologies — Revivification offers something quietly radical: a reverence for one man's life, and for the very human tissue through which he made his work. Revivification is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until August 3, 2025.
West Australian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
The West Australian Pulse: AGWA announces Freya Byrne as winner of Young Visual Artist Award
The West Australian Pulse: AGWA announces Freya Byrne as winner of Young Visual Artist Award
