Cloud 9.: N.Smith Gallery

Joshua Charadia is a Sydney-based artist whose work casts an aesthetic and critical eye on the complex forms of Australia’s industrial landscape. He explores the nature of perception and awareness by drawing close attention to these ubiquitous yet overlooked scenes. Working with the slow mediums of oil paint and charcoal, Charadia affords time to these images, usually seen in passing or from a distance. 

Charadia received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney in 2017. He has presented solo exhibitions in Sydney and Katoomba, and been featured in group exhibitions throughout Australia. Charadia has been a finalist in numerous art prizes, including the Sulman Prize (2020) and Dobell Drawing Prize (2021, 2019). In 2021 he was awarded the Fisher's Ghost Art Award South West Sydney Award, in 2020 he was awarded People’s Choice at the Adelaide Perry Prize, and in 2018 won 2nd place at the Belle ArtStart Prize. His works are held in the National Art School collection and private collections around Australia.

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Combining a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, the duo's work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of prefabricated structures and objects into extraordinary sculptures and installations. Readymade materials often feature in their work, including Lego, Ikea furniture, car and aircraft parts, dinosaur bones, and reconfigured architectural structures.

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Since the late 1980s, Joan has exhibited across a range of mediums, from drawing, painting, photography and sculpture to installation, video, and virtual reality. Her experimental works combine colonial iconography and landscape painting with collaged elements of western commodity culture connected to land tenure and Aboriginal peoples' active presence on the land.

Recent projects include designing the hoarding for The Art Gallery of New South Wales' Sydney Modern expansion, and illuminating the façade of The National Gallery of Australia during the 2021 Enlighten Festival. Joan was awarded the National Art School Fellowship in 2023.

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James’ artistic practice specialises in experimental and historical photographic processes. He uses a hybrid of analogue and digital photographic techniques to create contemporary artworks that reference Australian society and history. The processes he employs are the physical manipulation of digital photographic printing, such as the manual hand-colouring of digital prints or the application of physical interventions to the surfaces of digital prints. James also uses the historical 19th century photographic process of the Becquerel daguerreotype with the aid of modern technology to create new and contemporary daguerreotypes. Photography was historically used to document Aboriginal culture and the European colonisation of Australia. James is interested in these unique photographic processes to re-contextualise the representation of Australian society and history.

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Louise Zhang 张露茜 is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the dynamics of aesthetics, contrasting the attractive and repulsive in order to navigate the senses of fear, anxiety and a sense of otherness reflecting her identity.

Zhang's  work is inspired by horror cinema, Chinese mythology and botany, adopting and placing symbols and motifs in compositions of harmonic dissonance. Her practice explores Chinese mythology – paintings, sculptures and scroll-like banners that incorporate demons, dismembered body parts and organs drawn from anatomy books – overlaid with illustrations of flowers, bones, scholar rocks and auspicious imagery presented in a sugary palette. The aim is to create a visual cacophony, a disjointed and disorientating mash-up of symbols and imagery in an attempt to in part reconcile and make sense of the fissures and contradictions that define her own identity.

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