This week, Art Nation profiles Ewan Leslie, the stage actor said to be the next Geoffrey Rush. Like many actors Leslie is unassuming off stage, perhaps even a little shy. He certainly bears no resemblance to the blood-stained, unsettlingly charismatic monster he recently summoned for eight exhausting performances a week for the Melbourne Theatre Company. He was acting in the title role in Richard III, a production by MTC's artistic director Simon Phillips that gained almost unanimously ecstatic reviews.
Art Nation catches up with Leslie as he prepares for his latest role as Josef K in Franz Kafka's The Trial at Melbourne's Malthouse.
Colin Lanceley is one of Australia's most significant but least known collage artists. This week on Art Nation, Lanceley looks back on his career from the Annandale Imitation Realists in the 60s to his latest exhibition in Sydney.
Now 72 and perhaps at the peak of his career, Lancely made his name as a young, rebellious force on the Sydney art scene in the early 1960s when with two other young artists he founded Annandale Imitation Realists and overturned accepted conventions. As part of this spoof art organisation his work included creating two much lauded assemblages - The Dry Salvages and Gemini - both crafted from street junk.
Lanceley describes this as a time when Australia was a relative backwater. "Here in Sydney it was as flat as a tack. It was the Menzies government which everyone was tired of and young people were all pissed off with, didn't want anything to do with it, it was everyone's bete noire, all the people that I knew anyway and it was a time which, where that kind of conservatism and lack of guts, lack of courage which is one of the things that, one of the things that we were motivated by actually."
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