Former head of Lismore TAFE art department, Steve Giese, headlines a double art exhibition opening at North Lismore’s Serpentine Community Gallery tonight.

Gallery director Corinne Batt-Rowden said she was excited and proud to have Steve exhibiting at the gallery, alongside another local, Shannon Bourne.

'Prelude to the Great Wave' by Steve Giese (oil on canvas, 2020) was done during the lead up to the Covid experience we are still living with. It’s a metaphoric representation of Australia - a strange island full of predatory distractions.

“He’s a significant person in our local art community who has helped so many people develop as artists on their journies, through his role at TAFE,” Rin said.

“Steve won the Tasmanian Art Prize a couple of years ago and the winning painting will be on show for two weeks in the street-front display window at the gallery.”

'Happy Hour' by Steve Giese (oil on canvas, 2021) is a painting that reflects the inebriated complacency that characterises Australia.

Recently Steve has been making still life and landscape paintings as a change from the more politicised images. He believes that still life has something to say beyond the formal qualities of the image.

Steve commented that his works in this exhibition respond to a range of painting genres, from still life and landscape to social commentary.

His painting 'Happy Hour' was entered in the Blake Prize, because "alcohol unfortunately is where many Australians find an easily accessible spirituality"/

“I have always found painting to be challenging, eternally mercurial, a medium capable of communicating a full range of human experience,” Steve said.

"During the Covid lockdown we spent an extra two billion dollars on booze. Writers such as Donald Horne wrote of the 'Lucky Country' in the hands of an unfocussed, hedonistic people."

Dead Angel by Shannon Bourne (acrylic and oil pastels on canvas).

Lismore local Shannon Bourne, will also exhibiting in her first solo exhibition and presenting her latest body of work 'Beneath the Naked Eye'.

Rin said Shannon’s body of work is a “brave exhibition of raw expression”.

“Shannon shows this through an in-depth personal enquiry to create a high intensity dynamic and thought provoking show,” she said.

Both exhibitions open tonight, Friday April 23, from 6pm till 8pm - and will be on show until May 3. 

'Still Life with Wedge Tailed Eagle Egg' by Steve Giese (oil on board, 2020) shows an the egg on the very edge of the table - symbolises how our ecology is on a very precarious edge.