Dreamweavers

Dreamweavers is a touring show Curated by Simon Gregg at the Gippsland Regional Gallery, touring Nationally from 2011 until April 2013.

The exhibition explores the contemporary preoccupation for the Fantastic through a range of national and international art practices, that are united by an enduring fascination with darkness and dark places. Dreamweavers is a multi-sensory experience that is more like entering another world than an art exhibition. It combines sculpture, digital media, photography and painting, in an intoxicating visual feast.

Dreamweavers features the work of six artists. James Gleeson (1915-2008) was Australia’s pre-eminent Surrealist, and one of the country’s most acclaimed twentieth century artists. In his work massive, heaving and largely unidentifiable forms meld with apocalyptic skies and earth in twisted biomorphic shapes.

Late

Late (2012) is one of a series of works investigating the relationship between artist and ideas of liminality and location. This work was produced in inland Queensland, and invited to be exhibited as a shortlisted group of artists in the Bayton Awards, for the Rockhampton City Gallery.

Prevention of diabetes in rural India with a telemedicine intervention

Background : Diabetes care is not presently available, accessible, or affordable to people living in rural areas in developing countries, such as India. The Chunampet Rural Diabetes Prevention Project (CRDPP) was conceived with the aim of implementing comprehensive diabetes screening, prevention, and treatment using a combination of telemedicine and personalized care in rural India.

Methods : This project was undertaken in a cluster of 42 villages in and around the Chunampet village in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A telemedicine van was used to screen for diabetes and its complications using retinal photography, Doppler imaging, biothesiometry, and electrocardiography using standardized techniques. A rural diabetes center was set up to provide basic diabetes care.

Results : Of the total 27,014 adult population living in 42 villages, 23,380 (86.5%) were screened for diabetes, of which 1138 (4.9%) had diabetes and 3410 (14.6%) had prediabetes. A total of 1001 diabetes subjects were screened for complications (response rate of 88.0%). Diabetic retinopathy was detected in 18.2%, neuropathy in 30.9%, microalbuminuria in 24.3%, peripheral vascular disease in 7.3%, and coronary artery disease in 10.8%. The mean hemoglobin A1c levels among the diabetes subjects in the whole community decreased from9.3 ± 2.6% to 8.5 ± 2.4% within 1 year. Less than 5% of patients needed referral for further management to the tertiary diabetes hospital in Chennai.

Left-wing melancholies

With the recent passing of the world's "best-known unknown filmmaker," Chris Marker, it is axiomatic that left-wing melancholy now includes the ongoing loss of previously lost causes – a paradox that suggests the true address of all lost causes worth defending is a strange confluence of past and futural states, as one state. This double loss as gain is also the primary mark of the "landscape" of pessimistic optimism that also denotes the foremost position to occupy today in the battles associated with capitalist End Times (Slavoj Žižek's term). Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of "the dead" in the persistence of forms of high-formalist and high-conceptualist works of art and architecture. This paper examines the late works of the late Chris Marker, including the very short videos he uploaded to You Tube under the pseudonym "Kosinki" from 2007 to 2011, an event contiguous with his return to exhibiting very-still photography from 2006 to 2011. Marker's simultaneous returns to still photography and the short film-essay are both magnificent gestures toward the austerities required of present-day media to effect the necessary "return" to what is always present in one form or another anyway – the non-place between world and world-to-come.

Expanding horizon (Reykjavík)

Expanding horizons (Reykjavík) (2012-2013) is part of an ongoing series of interactive net-art/installation works that explores the space of the horizon line. Produced with time-lapse photography, animated movements, and playing with perception, this work explores how the vastness of a horizon line can be captured, compressed and re-presented for viewers to align with as an artwork

Cardiovascular disease risk in the offspring of diabetic women: the impact of the intrauterine environment

The incidence of gestational diabetes is increasing worldwide, exposing large numbers of infants to hyperglycaemia whilst in utero. This exposure may have a long-term negative impact on the cardiovascular health of the offspring. Novel methods to assess cardiovascular status in the neonatal period are now available—including measuring arterial intima-media thickness and retinal photography. These measures will allow researchers to assess the relative impact of intrauterine exposures, distinguishing these from genetic or postnatal environmental factors. Understanding the long-term impact of the intrauterine environment should allow the development of more effective health policy and interventions to decrease the future burden of cardiovascular disease. Initiating disease prevention aimed at the developing fetus during the antenatal period may optimise community health outcomes.

Evanescent

Exhibition of original artworks created in 2013. Evanescent is a new series produced in 2013 which premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival 15-24 March 2013. The series revisits a childhood delight and fascination with the projected image and the natural world. For me then, as it is now, a magnifying glass was a wonder; its simple optics twisted light into abstract comas and sci-fi aberrations; able to compact a whole view into a luminous, paradoxically inverted phantom that could fit literally into the palm of my hand. By curling fingers and thumb around the lens and cupping both hands around the elusive rays, and by peering into the space in which I had trapped them, I fancied that I had entered into the secret workings of the eye. Chrysalis, for example, appears as a scenic projection from a hand-held lens and simultaneously as the litter of the forest floor. It is produced with a makeshift camera-obscura. The nebulous silhouettes of trees, some blurred under the passing clouds of a summer wind resolve here and there into crisp lines curled across the surface of a fallen leaf on which a moth chrysalis adheres. The leaf assumes Brobdingnagian proportions and thickness as the evanescent image shrinks and is foreshortened then dissolves in the enlarged dust and grit. It manifests the unique sight anchored at this fixed point, to reveal what we might see if we were to become vegetable or mineral. Near and far, large and small, superimpose, trigonometrically exact in their adjacency and spatial relations, presenting us with a located point of view.Why? I want to understand more intimately the interior of the natural landscape, rather than any ‘scene’ of human presence, or the context of any cultural landmark. In the steep, bush locations in which I am making these images, my means are necessarily makeshift; my camera and an old manual-aperture lens able to be carried in a backpack with a black T-shirt as a 'dark-tent'. The project is not systematic but intuitive and responsive to prevailing conditions and the effect on the projection caused by sun, shade, weather and situation. I am guided by the response of objects, textures and surfaces to the projected image and how they modulate and map it. This is landscape, but not from a human point of view.

Alison Bennett : shifting skin

Ten large exhibition prints with digital 3D augmented reality overlay

Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum : history and collections

A publication of works from the permanent collection and a history to mark the centenary of the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum. The photographs have been produced using superimposed exposures of polarised and non-polarised light; a technique for the optical and digital enhancement of colour saturation, reflection reduction and surface effects in reprography of painting developed by James McArdle.

An Iranian migrant mother's production of selves through her family photograph collection

In researching migrant identities, visual methodology offers much promise and yet there is a marked lack of recent research that makes use of visual methods. Previous studies of migrant identities have privileged verbal representations of identities. Gillian Rose's (2010) work with mothers and their family photographs in the United Kingdom, in which she describes the role of family photographs in both producing social subject positions and in maintaining family togetherness across distances, is a useful model for research into the construction and negotiation of migrant identities.

The literature on family photography suggests that it is usually the woman/mother who takes on the role of making the family photograph album; of narrating the family's story (Rose, 2010; Holland, 2009; 1991; Chambers, 2003). The family photograph collection, together with the participant's interwoven verbal interpretation, is a particularly relevant data source for use in identity research as there is the potential for key themes of place, mobilities and space to be explored at new depth and from a feminist perspective.

This paper will report on an ethics approved study of one Iranian migrant mother and her family photograph collection, focusing on her representation of the identities and subjectivities of herself and her children through photographs taken following migration to Australia. The paper will consider the participant's family photographs as both visual objects and visual-verbal narratives produced within historically and culturally situated discourses. It will explore how photographs and oral interpretations cohere to enable migrant mothers to re/produce selves. The paper will examine the production of subject positions specifically in relation to place, mobilities and space.

The research is situated within critical visual ethnography and is informed by a reflexive feminist approach. The meaning making of the photographs under study will be explored at the sites of production, image, and audience. The combined visual-verbal methods used in this study aim to provide a new contribution to the literature on migrant identities and form the basis of a scaled up research design of a larger cohort of mothers.

Alterations

Alterations
A project conceived by Paul Carter, Professor of Design / Urbanism, Architecture & Design, that explores the theme of 'Alterations' in clothes, identities and spaces. The project is inspired by Dandenong's rapidly mutating public and commercial spaces and the multicultural communities that animate them. The project features a multi-monitor video work Loops, textile-based installation, documentary photography, and poster manifestos. Artists featured include Dirk de Bruyn, Ed Carter, Paul Carter and Soo Yeun You.

Shifting skin

AR[t] is published by the AR Lab. This article provides insight into the development of the exhibition 'Alison Bennett: Shifting Skin'