Visual feast awaits in Wagga Art Gallery Spring Exhibition Program

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery has officially launched the Spring Exhibition Program with an array of shows about art, fashion and local talent.

The program, which opened to the public on Saturday, 24 September, features five new exhibitions that celebrate diversity and inclusion in creative practice from local to remote communities.

The five exhibitions are: Land Marks, the gallery’s collection of prints from remote First Nations communities of Central and Northern Australia; an immersive exhibition by Wagga-based artist Georgia Crowden in Sink Forms; Utopia Batiks from the Tamworth Textile Collection; a behind-the-scenes glimpse inside an emerging Riverina photographers’ studio in Future Photographers Lab; and collaborative works between local artists and The Art Factory artists in Eight More.

F.Stop Workshop project coordinators Dr James Farley and Patrick Ronald will speak about the Future Photographers Lab project ahead of the Spring Exhibition launch at 2:30 pm on Saturday.

The project showcases contemporary photographic practice across the Riverina.

Dr Farley and Mr Ronald will present a 10- week lab with an aim to inspire and support the next generation of local photographers.

Over the 10 weeks, audiences have the opportunity to see behind the scenes of artists’ studios as they develop ideas and bodies of work for the exhibition at the gallery’s new Project Space.

The lab will support five emerging photographers: Molly Burley, Brittany Hefren, Jessica Horner, Tayla Martin and Ash Smith.

Wiradjuri elder and fashionista Aunty Cheryl Penrith will launch a new fashion-inspired program on Saturday.

The gallery said the program encouraged people to discover their unique inner style with styling sessions, fashion restyle events and fashion swaps.

Gallery director Dr Lee-Anne Hall invited everyone to book the free programs.

“You’ll have lots of fun discovering your unique style with our resident fashionista Aunty Cheryl, and hearing about the project which is inspiring and supporting our next generation of local photographers,” Dr Hall said.

Utopia Batiks highlights key artworks from Tamworth Regional Gallery’s Fibre Textile Collection and includes works from some of Australia’s most prominent artists of the Eastern Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people, centred in the remote community of Utopia, 270 km north-east of Alice Springs.

Eight More celebrates the cultivation of work by four creative duos working collaboratively over several months to explore individual and shared practices and diversity between artists with and without disabilities.

Land Marks offers an insight into this worldview through ancestral creation stories that situate the individual in place and in relationship to each other.

Sink Forms is a new immersive exhibition that uses social commentary to explore spaces of the home, and how one’s relationship with space can change over time.

Through soft sculpture and bold paintings, Sink Forms artist Georgia Crowden explores how the COVID-19 lockdowns shifted her sense of personal comfort into an experience of confinement and vulnerability.

The Spring Exhibition Program can be viewed at the Wagga Art Gallery from Saturday, 24 September.

Aunty Cheryl Penrith’s Stylin up with Chezzy events are: Fashion Swap, on Saturday, 9 October, from 11 am to 1 pm; and Restyle, on Saturday, 29 October, from 11 am to 1 pm.

Bookings are essential. Visit Wagga Art Gallery for more information.