Ariel’s Song : The University of Western Australia

Ariel’s Song

Luisa Hansal, Jess Tan & Wade Taylor with works from the UWA Art Collection

12 February – 23 April 2022

In association with Perth Festival

Ariel’s Song celebrates how art can open a door between worlds. It is an exhibition about shipwrecked feelings, rich and strange transformations and magical thinking that places contemporary artists Luisa Hansal, Jess Tan and Wade Taylor in conversation with surreal and stormy visions from the UWA Art Collection.

The exhibition borrows its title from both a famous passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and takes a detour via a 1994 survey of Western Australian landscape painter Audrey Greenhalgh, whose paintings and drawings of the ocean searched for ‘the energy, vitality and movement beneath the surface’ of the tangible world.

Curated by Gemma Weston, this exhibition will feature new paintings and drawings by Luisa Hansal, Jess Tan and Wade Taylor in dialogue with ocean-scapes from the UWA Art Collection. The artists’ approaches to painting are variously representational, emotional and sculptural, offering a mediation on how artists can open a door between worlds, or suggest mysterious forces at work beneath the surface of this one.

A Perth Festival exhibition supported by Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmers Arts.