Diana Barker Smith – This Place Where They Dwell
Image: Diana Baker Smith, This Place Where They Dwell, 2024, Four channel 4K video, 5.15 minutes. Image courtesy the artists and Penrith Regional Gallery. Photo, Lucy Parakhina
By RAQUEL BLANKEVOORT
Sydney-based artist, Diana Barker Smith presents her new major commission inspired by the life and legacy of acclaimed 20th Century Modernist artist Margo Lewers (1908 – 1978).
In this four-channel video installation, presented within the Penrith Regional Gallery’s historic Lewers House, This Place Where They Dwell invites audiences to experience this once private and intimate space where Margo Lewers and her family lived, made art, raised her children, mourned her husband and died.
Lewers was a pioneer in her art, using an experimental interdisciplinary practice that spanned a broad range of media scapes from painting, collage, textiles, sculptures, mosaic, pottery and furniture design.
Collaborating with dancer and choreographer, Cheryl Stock and acclaimed Australian–American composer and soprano Jane Sheldon This Place Where They Dwell is Smith’s homage to the personality and history that is enshrined within the heritage building and gardens of the Penrith Regional Gallery. Her work reflects on the spirit of arguably one of the most important Australian abstract expressionist movement artists of the post-war period. Smith uses the intersection of performance and moving images to examine the politics of art history through archival research, collaboration and embodiment.
May 11 – August 4
Penrith Regional Gallery, 86 River Road, Emu Plains
penrithregionalgallery.com.au
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