Artists paint the city mythical

Over 200 artists feature in this year’s Art Month Sydney, a creative blitz which launched in March and involves over 100 galleries

Artistic Director, Eliza Muldoon said: “We want people to get excited about contemporary art and make them feel both welcome and involved.”

The event is in its third year and includes a host of exhibitions, talks, private collection visits, studio tours and art-making workshops with leading Australian artists.

Sydneysiders can expect a vibrant ‘Art at Night’ program, involving DIY tours of local galleries followed by drinks and performances by a range of FBi DJs.

British artist James Guppy takes ordinary people and transforms them into mythical creatures in his exhibition ‘Anima Rising’ at the Brenda May gallery in Waterloo.

“It relates to the obsession I have with mythology and a fascination with the irrational, fantasy is very revealing,” he said.  “Mythology reveals aspects of myself, the stories have some sort of universal meaning. The inevitability of fate.”

Mr Guppy has featured in several notable exhibitions, including the 1987 Archibald Prize and the 1989 Blake Prize.

“With the exhibition, I was trying not to be to pragmatic but to allow the unknown to come out. What I hope to do is to surprise myself in a good way and reach further, those are the usual challenges I set myself,” he said. “I wanted to show strong female figures – I was learning about this aspect of female power.”

“One of the interesting things I’ve realised is it’s all about flight and weight, if you notice there is reference to it in every painting through floating, birds or wings.”

Artist Julie Rrap will bring her intense performance body of work to the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, with “Loaded”.

“I realised that for me art practice was both conceptual and chaotic in that ideas both formed, deformed and un-formed as the work unfolded,” she said.  “This balance between the rational and the intuitive allows the image to make a claim on us; to perhaps swallow us up.”

The exhibition involves ink-coloured shoes which are used as painting tools.

“Wearing the shoes privileges the artist’s foot over the hand but references gestural abstraction and all its associated myths,” she said.

“The work developed as a photo documentation of an intense period of performance actions on the surface of a large stretched canvas wearing the ink shoes.”

Art Month Sydney runs until March 25.

By Georgia Fullerton