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…as the Serpent Struggles Ann Newmarch (b. 1945) O.A.M is a senior South Australian artist who was at the vanguard of feminist art in Australia in the early 1970s, making her mark as a printmaker, photographer, and painter in particular, and through community-engaged, activist projects such as public murals and, in part, her latest exhibition, … as the Serpent Struggles. Ann produced this significant body of paintings and prints during the 1980s, inspired by her experience of the Central and Western Desert areas of the NT and SA and by the challenge of a postcolonial view. Ann’s engagement with Aboriginal art in these works is prescient of broader debates around cultural authenticity and representation, as surveyed by the later seminal exhibition From Appropriation to Appreciation (Flinders University Art Museum, 1988) which included her work. The exhibition’s central motif of the car or car-wreck in the desert predates the cliché, just as Ann’s approach (to) and treatment of a desert Aboriginal aesthetic (in ‘dot’ painting) came at a time when the so-called desert acrylic-on-canvas movement was first beginning to take hold. Ann’s work responds to the immediacy of this movement and to the presence and palette of Aboriginal desert iconography. Her dotting/pixilation is also about the screen – both as and in reference to screenprinting and screen-mediated culture. ‘An artist has a responsibility as an image-maker to concerns wider than herself or her art’, says Ann, quoted in a recent article in The Australian about her politicised screenprints (Bronwyn Watson, ‘Ann Newmarch print at Flinders Uni tackles radiation and birth defects’, 16 July 2016). ‘It’s not much use being concerned only about women’s art when uranium is being mined and Aborigines are losing their land, and when Uncle Sam stings your armpit and your kids want to eat at Hungry Jack’s, and when TV takes the place of learning and doing.’ Since 1969, Ann Newmarch has presented over 30 solo exhibitions and participated in over 100 significant group exhibitions, including the well-known WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution international exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007) in which she was the only Australian artist represented. … as the Serpent Struggles is timed to coincide with the WOW (Women of the World) Festival, GYRACC, Katherine, 16-18 September, at which a number of prints by Ann will also be on display. 1/0

Tennant Creek Mens’ Centre Art Tennant Creek Mens’ Centre Art Public programs: Artist panel, Saturday 12 August 1pm; other public programs tba. This is an exhibition of experimental paintings/2D works by participants in an art therapy program for Aboriginal men in Tennant Creek; The program was run by Anyinginyi Health’s Piliyintinji-ki Stronger Families Men’s Centre and facilitated by Melbourne/NT-based artist Rupert Betheras. Artists (working list): Rupert Betheras, Fabian Brown, George Butler, Scott Butler, Marcus Camphoo, Jeremiah Curtis, Timothy Dickson, Bradley Duggie, David Duggie, Danny Frank, Alfred Lauder, Elton Limbian, Neville Murphy, James Nelson, Merlin Newcastle, Fabian Rankine, Eddie Small, Kevin Shannon, Joseph Williams, Simon Wilson. 1/0

Cut Colony Launch: Friday 4 March 6-8pm Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine interrogates the Australian postcolonial in her film-based work Cut Colony (2012). Consandine explores in this work the relationship between subjects and unforgiving landscapes as physical expressions of psychological states. Both the clay pans and desert lakes of outback New South Wales set the stage for awkward and assertive interactions between the subject and the environment; tense performances that invoke and consider binaries of wet/dry, masculine/feminine, stillness/movement, open/contained, composed and uneasy. Consandine explains, “The relationship that I have as a white Australian in this country to something that’s unnerving, unsettling about these expansive interior landscapes which for someone who’s living in Melbourne and kind of existing on the fringes of this continent… still finds it hard to reconcile herself with, as I think many Australians find it hard to reconcile themselves with their relationship to the Australian landscape and these central desert areas.” Cut Colony will show in the Screeroom at NCCA 27 February to 26 March. Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums, including sculpture and spatial practice, video and performance. Her research interrogates the body in the Australian landscape, and its condition in relation to the physiological and psychoanalytic elaborations of space and its emotion. Consandine has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice in the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She received a PhD from Monash University in 2015, and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents gallery, Melbourne. 1/0

Gonzo Décor – Hunting Trophies (Southern Windows series) Artist talk: 11am, Saturday 15 November, NCCA Adelaide-based Ben Leslie presents sculptural installation in the Boxset as part of André Lawrence’s SouthernWindows series of window gallery-based exhibitions, placing the work of exceptional emerging South Australian artists in the NT. The project’s curator, André Lawrence, is from the NT and currently based in Adelaide. Lawrence states: ‘The premise for this series of exhibitions, while inherently tied to my own identity as a part-Northern Territorian, was also founded in a desire to uncover and explore past relationships between the NT and SA in order to develop future ones’. Leslie is an emerging artist and sculptor, and Director of Operations at Fontanelle Gallery & Studios, Adelaide. His bold sculptural forms often take tropes from monumentalism, animalism and the formless, spurred by informed and often humorous responses to art theoretical ideas and writing. The production/installation of this work has been assisted by the Helpmann Academy, Adelaide. 1/0

Nigel Sense: Visitor Centre 11 March - 16 April 2022 Darwin-based artist, Nigel Sense transforms NCCA into his interpretation of a visitor centre. In addition to newly-commissioned large canvases, the exhibition sees Sense experimenting with new materials as he paints Territory icons on eskies, t-shirts, plates, and a family-sized camping tent. Showcasing a collection of must-see places from the viewpoint of someone who has recently moved here, this is Nigel Sense’s very own Welcome to the NT Visitor Centre. Catalogue Artists Talk Nigel Sense Saturday 9 April - 11am Michael Fox presents Tax Maters for the Arts Saturday 12 March - 11am Curator Petrit Abazi Artist Nigel Sense 1/0

The Other The ghost of art practices past haunt Darwin artist Leon Waud out of a 14-year hiatus and back once again to making art. His exhibition in Gallery 2, ’The Other’, is comprised of sculptural works, paintings and interactive digital film. Ghostliness is a lingering theme of this work, not only in the sense of apparitions but also as ‘traces’ – moments, gaps and juxtapositions which suggest the eerie presence of the in-between. Ghostliness for Waud is also a manifestation of fear and the power of a fearfulness he has imbued in certain objects: “This fear seems to be completely irrational but however it is there existing outside of rationality; this for me was the other.” Leon Waud is a Darwin-based artist who works across a range of mediums. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the Queensland University of Technology. He has held solo shows including Same Shit Different Room, Soapbox Gallery, Brisbane (2002) and No Fixed Address, Development Space, Metro Arts Brisbane (1999); and participated in a number of group shows including: Serendipity and Lunacy (in contemporary photography), Soapbox Gallery, Brisbane (2002), Between Now and Tomorrow, Gallery 482, Brisbane (2002) and Endzone, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2000). 1/0

Spent It Spent It is Darwin artist Sarah Pirrie’s wry response to Territory Day, that one day of the year when the Territory ‘lifestyle’ seems to amount to how much noise and litter can be made with the letting off of fireworks. What was ‘spent’ – the artist in making the work; the land/sea-scape bearing the scars and debris of the event? Pirrie is not against fireworks for all but highlights the lack of a clean-up and environmentally friendly response. Sarah Pirrie is a leading NT contemporary artist who lectures in art at Charles Darwin University. She works across a range of mediums though is best known for her sculptural and installation-based work which often relates to environmental research and related issues, and with a particular focus on marine and mangrove ecologies in the Top End. 1/0

Vexed NCCA presents Vexed, a solo exhibition by Fiona Foley in the main gallery and screen room. Taking its name from Foley’s 2013 video work which was filmed in Alice Springs, Vexed concerns the disruption to traditional courting and betrothal/marriage customs wrought by colonisation. Implicit in this scenario is the vexed and changing role of Aboriginal women on the colonial frontier. The exhibition will feature retrospective works by Foley that address the same theme, as well as a new letter-based sculpture spelling the words ‘Black Velvet’, produced in association with Brisbane-based Urban Art Projects. Fiona Foley is a Badtjala artist from Fraser Island (Thoorgine), Queensland, who resides in Brisbane. She is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists; in 2014 she was awarded the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Award, recognised as a ‘fearless advocate for Indigenous political and social equality’. 1/0

Window Shopping Through projected animation of mannequins, Halliday takes a glimpse into a world inhabited by beautiful, stern, plastic people – figures who attract the eye with there seductive and glamorous affectations but who also repulse, with their cold stylised and sterile visages that reveal materialistic and simplistic desires. 1/0

Once Upon a Toy Town Congratulations to Siying Zhou – NCCA 2013 Overall Winner, Clifford Relph – Highly Commended Award, Joel Mitchell – Honourabe Mention Award, Andy Ewing – Honourable Mention Award and David Wickens – NCCA Professional Development Award. A big THANK YOU to this years sponsors of the Artists Awards: Brian Tucker Accounting, Cope Sensitive Freight, Sky City Darwin, Parap Fine Foods, Jacksons Drawing Supplies, Art Monthly and All About Tea and Coffee in Parap. 1/0

COnCREtE Opening Friday 27 May, 6-8pm In many a Kalymnian household anywhere around the world can be found a proud mantle display of sea sponges. Once the main source of income for the island of Kalymnos, the sponge is both a commodity and a symbol of identity. Emerging artist and curator Koulla Roussos plays with concepts of fluidity and the concrete, incorporating the iconic sea sponge as a metaphor and tool for interrogating subjective manifestations of identity; asking the question, “How do I materialise my hybrid, fluid subjectivity for the anonymous spectator?” COnCREtE is an installation-based work incorporating sculpture, digital print, video and found objects. Koulla was born in Darwin. In 1987 she graduated from the University of Adelaide in Economics, and in 1993 with Honours in Law from the Northern Territory University. She was admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor in the Supreme Court of NT in 1995, and is currently a barrister with John Toohey Chambers, Darwin, specialising in criminal law. Koulla is also a practicing artist and curator. She has undertaken postgraduate studies in Art History and professes a keen interest in exploring the ways contemporary art can engage with public spaces and create new understandings of a place. She has curated several exhibitions in Darwin including Monsters from the Black Lagoon (2015), TaNTtrum (with Jonathan Saunders, 2013/2014), Origin of a Species (2014), Flash Art (2013), and a year-long monthly program of arthouse film at NCCA (The Vault, 2015). 1/0