Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) has four new exhibitions opening this March with works by local and interstate artists that include reinterpretations of images from Frank Hurley’s Trans-Atlantic expedition of 1914-17, a playful look at the language surrounding death, joint responses to lyrics by Leonard Cohen and a painterly response to balancing motherhood, land management and conservation.

NEAR ENOUGH (IS GOOD ENOUGH) | Aaron Butt

NEAR ENOUGH (IS GOOD ENOUGH) explores Frank Hurley’s images of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 through a series of experimental paintings. Critiquing the colonial and patriarchal goals of expeditions and using colours and patterns responsive to the unintentional and non-indexical colourations of Hurley’s photographic images, the works in this exhibition play with techniques, pigments and substrates in unexpected ways.

Pushing Up Daisies | Emma Lynn Winkler

Fusing painting, animation and ceramics, Pushing Up Daisies explores the themes of death and avoidance. Centred around the irony of euphemisms that allude to our inescapable decay, this exhibition reflects on these absurd phrases as expressions of anxiety. With sincere curiosity, this exhibition playfully highlights the absurdity of contemporary attitudes towards death and the futility of attempting to ignore it. Like its eponymous euphemism, Pushing Up Daisies dances around the topic of death, creating an intriguing network of connections and associations.

Where the Light Gets In | Sam & Jacqui Sosnowski

This joint exhibition by Sam and Jacqui Sosnowski showcases the couple’s talents in both printmaking and ceramics. Based on the Leonard Cohen song, Anthem, Sam’s prints investigate the play of light and shadow while Jacqui’s (mainly raku) ceramics explore the preceding line of the song - there’s a crack in everything…. The work of both artists’ combines to offer the viewer distinct yet harmonious evocations of this classic song.

Worlds Within Worlds | Emily Imeson

Emily Imeson is a Northern Rivers artist exploring ideas of care, bush regeneration, recycling, and the macro/micro to expand understandings of landscape and painting. Concepts of support and regeneration are now vital to her practice since became a mother and part land holder of a large, degraded farm in 2022. Through an expanded painting lens propelled by desires to coexist compassionately with the world Emily creates slow, site-specific works in between and during days of mothering, gardening, cooking, and regenerating the land. These works are a combination of dissecting resolved landscape paintings and patch-working with varying experimental and ecologically sensitive modes of mapping. Through material exploration Emily ponders the layered climate complexities embedded in our environment, navigating ideas of compost, recycling, and waste, alongside creatively adapting bush regeneration techniques.

All exhibitions open Thursday 6 March and continue until Sunday 27 April. The official exhibition launch will be held 5.30 – 7.30pm, Thursday 6 March.