SYDNEY.- The Art Gallery of New South Wales announces Playback the third Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial, from 7 July until 21 October 2018.

Continuing the legacy of the Dobell Prize for Drawing and supported by the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, this exhibition presents new work by eight contemporary Australian artists who are exploring history through crossovers between drawing and the moving image.

In Playback works by Vernon Ah Kee, Sharon Goodwin, Laura Hindmarsh, Locust Jones, Dorota Mytych, Jason Phu, Lucienne Rickard and Nick Strike respond to images found in art history, archives, newspapers, cinema and online.

“By reanimating images from the past, the artists selected for Playback enliven our sense of curiosity about history but also encourage us to understand the ways in which history repeats itself," said Art Gallery of NSW curator Matt Cox.

“There are drawings in Playback that also invoke the moving image as they unfold and reform in a process of recycling, and in so doing, the image, rather than being recovered or restored, becomes something other,” added Cox.

Playback showcases the most recent work in Vernon Ah Kee’s ongoing Unwritten series, in which his ghostly drawings of faces stand as a testament to the violence of the 2004 Palm Island riots, while Sharon Goodwin’s work breaks away from the two dimensional realms normally associated with drawing in her re-contextualising of the story of the Egyptian-born St Anthony the Great.

Ingrid Bergman and Rita Hayworth are among the women populating Laura Hindmarsh’s drawings that record the artist's online experiences with cinematic cult-classics in which the female protagonist appears doubled or mirrored in the camera frame.

Locust Jones considers our consumption of current events as he uses a bamboo nib to create a scrolling visual ticker tape of the 24-hour news cycle. Jones’ expansive drawing is a visual diary of the events and people that made the daily news, from New Year’s Eve to April Fools’ Day 2018.

Dorota Mytych uses sand to create a mesmerising series of moving drawings in which images of constellations, cups, landscapes and famous artworks appear and disappear, while Jason Phu brings humour to the exhibition with his cheeky drawings and performance inspired by bathroom wall graffiti and Chinese folklore.

Graphite drawings by Lucienne Rickard are executed on drafting film through an obsessive and laborious process, recording her memories of loved ones and the pain of loss.

Nick Strike recreates 24 frames from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist film Un chien Andalou (1929) so viewers can reanimate them with a smartphone - evoking the pre-cinema technology of the flip-book where still images are made to move with thumb pressure.

Following the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition Playback: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2018 will tour regionally to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (16 March – 5 May 2019) and Orange Regional Gallery (12 October – 8 December 2019).