Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter
3 December 2022 - late 2023
Art Gallery of New South Wales
North Building – Lower Level 2
Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter reveals what 29 artists from Australia and farther afield have made of the idea of home. For these artists, home is not only a house or a place, it's also memories, people - and stories.
Set across a series of rooms which do not align exactly, the exhibition itself forms a house of dreams in which locations and timeframes are always shifting. The artists take us to Cape Town, Los Angeles, Fitzroy Crossing; into living rooms, disaster zones and vast landscapes. Evocations of intimacy and sanctuary give way to visions of loss and upheaval, followed by projections of rebuilding and reconnection.
Here art-making is a form of critical dreaming, a grounded way of imagining otherwise in unstable times.
This exhibition features newly commissioned works John Prince Siddon. The three works are titled Web Art, Will the lion still be king? and Wirral our Country dying from climate change. The final has been acquired for the collection by the Mollie Gowing Acquisition Fund for Contemporary Aboriginal Art 2022.
John Prince Siddon is a painter of home in the largest sense the Country he comes from and the planet it is part of. From his small living room in Fitzroy Crossing in the remote north- west of Australia, Prince creates works that are at once grounded and global - views that open from his place in the Kimberley to the churning, troubled world beyond. His main subject in these new works made for Dreamhome is the climate crisis, the effects of which are felt acutely in his part of Australia. Painted during a summer of unprecedented weather events in this country and elsewhere, the paintings take us from the embattled Great Barrier Reef to the animal kingdoms of neighbouring continents to a mythic web of interspecies connections. The word 'wirral', from the Walmajarri language, is an expression of worry, sadness, shock and awe.
John Prince Siddon (right) and Justin Paton – Head Curator of International Art, Art Gallery of NSW (left). Photograph by Jyles Reynolds.
