Tess Horwitz, This is now bone of my bones …, 2020. 102 x 268 cm. Black and white charcoal on paper. Image courtesy the artist.
OPENING EVENT Wednesday 2 June from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery. Free to attend, no bookings required. Opening address by Toni Hassan, Canberra writer and journalist and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture at Charles Sturt University.
2020 ushered in a cascade of droughts, fires, toxic smoke and the COVID pandemic. I watched my immediate family respond fearfully and angrily to these shudders of a dying ecosystem. With the globe spiralling into an unprecedented future, here, in relatively affluent and safe Australia, we continue to live our lives and dream our dreams, almost oblivious - semi-awake.
Each member of my family inhabits each day vibrantly within the material world of purposeful work,play, love and community, and each night falls through the rabbit hole into that other life, mysterious,outside rational time and space, perhaps essential for mulling on the anxieties from the outside world,perhaps symbolic, perhaps, as ancient peoples believed, auguries to be interpreted. In this time of events previously beyond belief, I mine the significant dreams of my family members, those dreams that have recurred again and again through the years, almost desperately searching for omens.The two surrealities - the global catastrophe and the vibrational dream existence - oscillate like DNA strands in these charcoal explorations.
Public program
Saturday 5 June 2021, 1:00 - 2:00 PM. Conversation with the artist Tess Horwitz about The Role of Dreams in Handling Daily Life. There will be paper and drawing media for participants to draw their dreams as the discussion takes place. No bookings required, just come to the gallery on the day.
Saturday 19 June 2021, 1:00 - 2:00 PM. (Repeat) Conversation with the artist Tess Horwitz about The Role of Dreams in Handling Daily Life. There will be paper and drawing media for participants to draw their dreams as the discussion takes place. No bookings required, just come to the gallery on the day.
In drawing, sculpture and multi-media installation work Tess Horwitz investigates power relations between culture and nature and experiments with the process of making art as commentary. Tess moves restlessly between diverse processes and materials, and between the private, public and community sphere, always aiming to provoke questioning of social assumptions.