In Harry’s exhibition, kitchen talk is mixed with the strange materiality of foreign words and place names encountered on the artist’s extensive travels and from his various family connections. He also uses the figurative forms of language for the shamanic power that habitually resides there, as well as in the transposition and metamorphosis of meaning invoked by anagrams.
Exhibition Dates: 24 May – 30 June 2007
Slang is the shortcut through language. The smooth formality of language ‘proper’ is swapped for something more unpredictable and unrefined. Perhaps more alive. Tough flourishes of meaning and understanding offer Newell Harry a rich vocabulary, good material with which to work. He deals in the tactility of language and the dirty poetics of elemental things in as much as these things already have a magical quality.
In Harry’s exhibition, Views from the couch, kitchen talk is mixed with the strange materiality of foreign words and place names encountered on the artist’s extensive travels (e.g. from Bislama, the national pidgin dialect of the South Pacific country of Vanuatu) and from his various family connections (e.g. from Afrikaans, the majority language of parts of South Africa and his mother’s mother tongue). He also uses the figurative forms of language—metaphor, assonance, homonym, alliteration—for the shamanic power that habitually resides there as well as in the transposition and metamorphosis of meaning invoked by anagrams.
Words are woven together with a variety of objects and textiles—an investment in impoverished material phenomena— as though they were substantially the same. Writing and spelling can be mistaken for abstract or decorative line and embellishment. Words are flags of subcultural identity—team colours—and have the first encounter aspect of colonial cultural cargo. A group of pandanus mats are tokens of ritual commodity exchange, involved in a discourse with the familiar soiled tools of manual labour (father’s work) and the unfamiliar accents of other artefacts to which speech has not yet become accustomed.
—Amanda Rowell
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In 2006, Newell Harry was included in the group exhibition, Our Lucky Country (difference), a MOP Project (curated by Ron and George Adams), at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre. In addition to a number of other awards, in 2002 and 2001 he was a Highly Commended finalist in the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship at Artspace in Sydney. His work was included in two group exhibitions at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in 2006: Rectangular Ghost (curated by Amanda Rowell) and Stolen Ritual. His work is held by Newcastle Region Art Gallery, the Ergas Collection as well as a number of private collections in Australia. In September 2007, his work will be included in a group exhibition curated by Aaron Seeto at Campbelltown Arts Centre called News from the Islands. Views from the Couch is Newell Harry’s first solo commercial exhibition and his first exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Group Show, from elsewhere
Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, 2024
Group Show, The First 40 Years
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2024
Newell Harry Small (oldish) works on paper
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2023
Newell Harry Sul Mare
17th Istanbul Biennial, 2022
Group Show, The Like Button
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2018-19
Newell Harry Known / Unknowns
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2017
Group Show, Tidalectics
TBA21-Academy, Austria, 2017
Endless Circulation
TarraWarra Biennial, 2016
All the World's Futures
56th Venice Biennale, 2015
Group Show, Artists' Proof #1
Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2012
Newell Harry Blue Pango: Musings & Other Anecdotes
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2012
Group Show, The Other's Other
Artspace, Sydney, 2012
Newell Harry Rendez-vous 11
Institut d'Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône Alpes, France, 2011-12
Newell Harry Untitled
(12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011
Group Show, True Story
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2010-11
Newell Harry Circle/s in the Round for (Miles and Miles +1)
Temperance Lane, Sydney, 2010
Mikala Dwyer Before and After Science
Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 2010
Newell Harry Fish or Cut Bait?
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2008
Group Show, Summer '07 '08
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2007
Group Show, Views from Islands
Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2007
Newell Harry Views from the Couch
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2007