March into local art

MARCH heralds a swathe of new exhibitions at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina.

Works relating to place, mortality, historic voyages and responses to music from local and interstate artists include reinterpretations of images from Frank Hurley’s Trans-Atlantic expedition of 1914-17 and a playful look at the language surrounding death.

There is a joint response to Leonard Cohen’s lyrics and a painterly treatment of balancing motherhood, land management, and conservation.

Northern Rivers artist Emily Imeson explores ideas of care, bush regeneration, recycling, and the macro/micro to expand the viewer’s understanding of landscape and painting in Worlds Within Worlds.

Since becoming a mother and part-owner of a large, degraded farm in 2022, Emily has been propelled by the desire to coexist compassionately with the world. Through material exploration, Emily ponders the layered climate complexities embedded in our environment, navigating ideas of compost, recycling, and waste alongside creatively adapting bush regeneration techniques.

Pushing Up Daisies by Emma Lynn Winkler fuses painting, animation, and ceramics to explore themes of death and avoidance. The exhibition reflects on the euphemisms used about death and identifies the phrases as expressions of anxiety, highlighting the absurdity of contemporary attitudes towards death and the futility of attempting to ignore it.

In Near Enough (Is Good Enough), Aaron Butt interrogates Frank Hurley’s images of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 through a series of experimental paintings.

Critiquing the expedition’s colonial and patriarchal goals, the works play with techniques, pigments and substrates in unexpected ways.

Where the Light Gets In by Sam and Jacqui Sosnowski responds to the famous line in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem and uses printmaking to investigate the play of light and shadow.

The ceramics explore the preceding line of the song “There’s a crack in everything”. The works combine distinct yet harmonious evocations of the classic song.

All four exhibits are now open until April 27.

For information, head to nrcgballina.com.au