Cirrus@Austlit

'The work ranges wider than this terrorist event, gathering within its orbit other facets of the "war on terror" that include a 2015 ISIS suicide bombing and the 2005 Cronulla Riots that pitted Caucasian Australians against largely Lebanese immigrants, thus placing issues of domestic and racial violence against a broader backdrop of global unrest. There is also a set of Twitter excerpts from a now-defunct account by Jake Bilardi, an eighteen-year-old Melbourne man who converted to radical Islam and died in a suicide bombing in Iraq, March 2015. ("Graffiti Triptych," 26) Also, The ocean cliff's buoyant wind wantons goose-bumped skin ("Something is Lost," 46) The often lush imagery points toward the realm of wonder and divine, of fertility and the chance for change, countering the violence, racism, and sexism that threads through much of the content.' (Publication abstract)

'Sean Lowry, founder and executive director of Project Anywhere and convener of creative and performing arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia, was in New York City in December 2014 for Project Anywhere's inaugural biennial conference, hosted by the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School for Design. Project Anywhere: Art at the Outer Limits of Location Specificity is an attempt to create a context in which one might host artistic research and in which the entire globe might be regarded as potential exhibition or performance space. After two years, and with a number of key institutions around the world involved-all of whom have representatives on the editorial committee-ten of the twelve projects that successfully navigated into the proposal stage were able to come along to our first conference event, which ironically is staged far from the outermost limits of location specificity, in New York City [laughter]. To me, something significant happened to the course of Australian art at that point where it realized-I think through the writings of the late Paul Taylor, an Australian expat who moved to New York, and others such as Rex Butler-and recognized that Australian artists possessed an understanding of art that was built through reproduction, as you pointed out, but also that there might be some paradoxical advantage in taking stock of this original/unoriginal status.'  (Publication abstract)

'Tomas, a cellist and dreamer, denies the devastating changes happening in 1930’s Germany—until he is drafted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Many years later, having emigrated to Australia, he raises his granddaughter Lara to love music and birds. He also chooses to hide from her a terrible secret.

'When her beloved Opa dies, 22 year-old Lara receives a shadow box of mysterious ornaments that force her to confront his past. Seeking to understand his years of silence, and to find a way through her own grief, she travels to Germany—the objects her only guide.

'Shadows & Wings is a novel of cyclic journeys between hemispheres, the connections between ourselves and those we can never know, and the haunting power of art, love and dreams. ' (Publication summary)