Design and Art Australia Online

A cross-cultural exhibition by Barayuwa Mununggurr and Ruark Lewis bridging the vastly different heritages and social realities of the art communities of Yirkalla and Sydney.

A major new installation work by Ruark Lewis, In my empty house, includes a collaboration with experimental filmmaker Loma Bridge. The exhibition is a portrait composite of internationally renowned anthropologist Vivienne Kondos and her husband Alex Kondos leaving their house, a space filled with the accumulated ephemera of living and the patina of over thirty years of anthropological and social research.

Hurry-Hurry is a selection of recent work by artists who embrace unfashionable forms of overtly politicised art – poster making, pamphleteering, performance and other activities flippantly considered marginal to dominant modes of contemporary cultural production. All are committed to inserting local issues — mining by multinationals, corruption in democracies, human rights — into a global context.

Riotous Suburbs presents threads of arguments about the economics and politics of space, housing, distribution and access as governments turn to private market solutions to housing needs. The artists essay the protest and civil unrest that has shadowed a decade of privatisation and great comfort for some.

Curator Ruark Lewis places work by eminent language artists Alex Selenitsch, Franz Ehmann and Ania Walwicz alongside that of an emerging generation. The exhibition unites aesthetic sensibility and avant-garde traditions with a critical approach to the dissemination and display of art.

Exhibition of new works at the EAF offered a range of focussed pieces exploring, among other things, ruminations on friendship and ageing; and evocative spoken soundscapes with sculptural associations. Literary works were present as visual and temporal pieces, and abstract typeset and drawn images suggested linguistic and aural impression etc.

Source: Solo Survey Exhibition Linkage Project, Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS
EAF annual report; AGNSW Library catalogue

Exhibition Catalogue:
Ingram, Simon, False narratives / Ruark Lewis. Burnley, Vic: NMA Publications, c2001
ISBN 0957754914

Source: Solo Survey Exhibition Linkage Project, Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS
Wollongong City Gallery annual report

Sydney Olympic Arts Festival

A collaborative installation by visual artist Ruark Lewis and writer Paul Carter which aims to show language as performance.

Source: Solo Survey Exhibition Linkage Project, Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS
AGNSW archive index cards; AGNSW Library catalogue; http://www.gangway.net/reviews/carter.html;

Exhibition Catalogue:
Carter, Paul and Lewis, Ruark, Raft. [Sydney]: Art Gallery of NSW, 1995
1 folded sheet (4p); ill ; 30cm

Source: Solo Survey Exhibition Linkage Project, Tasmanian School of Art, UTAS
AGNSW Library catalogue

Exhibition Catalogue:
Ruark Lewis: transcription drawings, 1988-1992. South Yarra, Vic: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1992
ISBN 0947220151