The Art Show

After rising to prominence locally in the early 2000s, Ricky Swallow left Australia and built an international art career with his small-scale, often intimate bronzes.   Speaking from LA, Ricky talks about his unconscious move towards abstraction, his first foray into public art for Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the profound impact of the recent California fires.

What began as a living archive of queer Black British experience in the early 2000s has morphed into visual memoir for the interdisciplinary artist Topher Campbell. Told through three of his arthouse films including the uncompromising Fetish (2018) where he walks the streets of New York completely naked, an Afrofuturistic sculpture and intimate sound work composed of missed WhatsApp messages, Campbell isn't afraid to take risks. His installation at the Tate Modern, My rukus! Heart (2024) is both radical history of queer blackness and an ode to his community, as well as the formative collaboration with rukus! Federation co-founder, photographer Ajamu X.

Latai Taumoepeau is an artist who thinks big. Not only is her subject matter expansive—the impact of global warming and rising sea levels in the South Pacific—increasingly she produces works of remarkable scale. Deep Communion sung in minor (ArchipelaGO, THIS IS NOT A DRILL), which premiered at Venice as part of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania and is now on at Artspace in Sydney, uses musical scores and sculptural interactive machines that simulate paddle boards to bring the immediacy of the climate crisis to the forefront.  It's a ritual and ceremony for our times, steeped in tradition; a call to action; and a love letter to her ancestral homeland of Tonga.

Blurring the line between commercial and high art, self-described Brisbane bogan CJ Hendry is a social media phenomenon.  Her seductive, hyperreal drawings of luxury and consumer goods, combined with marketing nous and a flair for self-promotion, have earned the New York-based expat a global following and commercial success.  While the core of her practice is drawing, CJ also mounts elaborate conceptual exhibitions that tweak her audience's innate sense of childlike wonder, and that's where she says her most creative work gets done.  But is it art, and who gets to decide?

Great conversations with visual artists, gallery and museum directors and curators.