Writer for September: David Hansen

Previously curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and before that coordinator of Melbourne's last Sculpture Triennial, David Hansen has a strong interest in the resonances of history through contemporary art.

Jeweller Julia de Ville's maker's mark is a pair of crossbones and the motto "Disce Mori" - "Learn to Die". A serious journeyman "mortalist", her work shows a deep familiarity with Renaissance and Early Modern European mortuary rituals and objects, as well as with the jet mourning jewellery of the Victorians. But de Ville's jewels involves much more than an antiquarian or reproductive interest, or some kind of emo pose; thanks to her skills as a taxidermist some of her brooches and pins actually incorporate the dead (mostly of other, smaller species than ours) "in the flesh".

Gunclub mocks the traditional hunter's trophy, with the friendly little half-length mouse emerging from its shield of jet. After the initial "is it real?" double-take comes another. At first the mouse's eyes look pale and blank, like those of a stuffed museum specimen with cotton wool bulging out of its sockets. Then comes the realization that the rodent's eyes have actually been replaced by diamonds. (Well, I suppose we are carbon-based life forms…)

It may be a bit upmarket for the young street goths of the artist's inner city neighbourhood, yet clearly it is also something of a conceptual challenge for the old or unhealthy wealthy. De Ville's work is as broadly interesting and difficult as the fundamental truth it contains, that (to borrow the title of a recent exhibition) "We are but dust and shadows" - "Pulius et Umbra Sumus".

DAVID HANSEN, D.Litt.

EXHIBITIONS & PUBLICATIONS
(AS AT AUGUST 2006)

RECENT EXHIBITIONS (initiator, curator and/or manager)

(an asterisk denotes exhibitions with a publication authored or edited by David Hansen)

2003 - 4 John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque *
(The paintings, drawings and prints of Anglo-Australian artist John Glover (1767-1849). National tour managed by Art Exhibitions Australia)

2003 Jörg Schmeisser: Breaking the Ice *
(Works from the Antarctic 1998-2003)

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

“The Picturesque and the Palawa: John Glover's `Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point' ”, in Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (eds.), Art and the British Empire , Manchester, Manchester University Press (in press)

"Table dancing: George Baldessin's Small banquet 1971", in XXX (ed.), XXX , Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery (in press)

"'Remarkable characters': John Dempsey and the representation of the urban poor in Regency Britain" (The Margaret Manion Lecture 2006, University of Melbourne), to be reprinted in The Melbourne Journal of Art , February 2007

"Senses of place", Conference dinner address, Hobart, April 2006, to be reprinted in Australian Historical Review , December 2006

"Drawn in, drawn out", in Gosia Wlodarczak: Skin of the Wall (exhibition CD-catalogue), Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra, August 2006

"The red pills: Jon Cattapan's neo-urbanism" (exhibition review), Art Monthly , 190. June 2006

"A person of the plain surface: Joseph Lycett - Convict Artist" (exhibition review), Art Monthly , 189, May 2006

"Bedrock Principles", in Janenne Eaton: Angle of Head (exhibition brochure), Helen Maxwell at Silvershot Gallery, Melbourne, May 200

"2006 Contemporary Commonwealth " (exhibition review), British Art Journal , vol. 7 no. 1, Spring/Summer 2006

"Van Diemen's Land", Island , 99, December 2004

“Art” and “John Glover”, in Alison Alexander, Jill Cassidy, Stefan Petrow, Henry Reynolds, Michael Roe, Michael Sprod and Barbara Valentine (eds.), Companion to Tasmanian History , Hobart, University of Tasmania, 2004

“What Glover saw”, Gallery (National Gallery of Victoria), August 2004 (??

“Glover the sketcher”, Antiques and Art in Victoria , August 2004 (??

“The Dead Parrot Sketch”, Newsletter of the Friends of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery , no. 95, Spring, 2004

"'O Earth, Return!' - Philip Wolfhagen's Tasmanian Pastorals", Art and Australia , vol. 42 no. 1, Spring 200

“John Glover - Finishing nature: from sketchbook notes to oil paintings”, artonview (National Gallery of Australia), 37, Autumn 200

“Politics, Panoramas and Palawa: a John Glover Reunion”, The World of Antiques and Art , no. 66, February, 200

“Glover's Man”, Newsletter of the Friends of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery , no. 93, Summer 2003-04

“John Glover revisited” (an interview with Angus Trumble), Art and Australia , vol. 41 no. 2, December, 2003

"'John Glover and the colonial picturesque': The artist and the exhibition", Australiana , vol. 25 no. 4, November 2003

John Glover: the Van Diemen's Land sketchbook of 1832-1834 , Hobart, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2003

“John Glover's `Mt Wellington'”, in Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History , Melbourne, Black Inc. Agenda, 2003

“Vast Difference”, in Jörg Schmeisser: Breaking the Ice (works from the Antarctic 1998-2003) (exhibition catalogue), Hobart, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2003

(untitled essay for/with Richard Wastell), Future Perfect (exhibition catalogue), Hobart, Bett Gallery, 2003

“The post-colonial jigsaw puzzle”, Art Monthly , 156, December, 2002

“The artist in the garden”, ( conference keynote address), Gardens of the Imagination, Australian Garden History Society annual conference, Hobart, October, 2002