Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
ZAHALKAWORLD
an artist's archive
7 December 2024 - 2 March 2025
Anne Zahalka is one of Australia’s most highly regarded photo-media artists who has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas for over 40 years. Her work explores cultural and environmental points of tension through a humorous as well as a critical lens.
ZAHALKAWORLD – an artist’s archive is a major survey exhibition that brings together bodies of work that span Zahalka’s practice and treasures from her archive that inform and inspire her. The exhibition encompasses material that is both personal and professional, intellectual and physical. Imaginative, immersive and playful, the exhibition invites audiences into the artist’s working life and creative process to explore her illusionary worlds.
There are eight key bodies of work that form the basis of the exhibition, including Bondi: Playground of the Pacific, The Landscape Re-presented, Resemblance and Resemblance II, Wild Life and Wild Life Australia, Open House, The Fate of Things and Details.
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This exhibition is also accompanied by an award-winning publication proudly supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation and an education kit.
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A Museum of Australian Photography travelling exhibition.
Image: Anne Zahalka, The Bathers 1989, from the series Bondi: playground of the Pacific, chromogenic print, 95 x 112cm. Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection, donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by the Bowness Family 2010. MAPh 2010.022. Courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Australian Photography.
MICHELE BEEVORS
ANATOMY LESSONS
30 November 2024 - 2 March 2025
Anatomy Lessons by Michele Beevors, features meticulously sculpted, life-sized animal skeletons painstakingly measured, drawn and sculpted from steel, wire, and foam, and knitted over, in a fine-art softening of the subject beneath. Seventeen years in the making, the creation of the pieces has been a long and exacting process: from measuring bones in museum basement collections, to sculpting and articulating skeletons, to the slow, meditative act of knitting. A silent, soft protest at the violence we are inflicting on the planet.
Image courtesy of the artist.
ANDREW ROBARDS
NOW SCREENING
30 November 2024 - 23 February 2025
Now Screening is an exhibition of digital media works by Mudgee based artist Andrew Robards that explores visual digital culture through the creation of hybridized screen languages incorporating captured imagery and animated sequences. Robards’ artistic practice utilises glitches, data-moshing techniques, kaleidoscopic and abstract patterns; spanning over numerous screens and devices to examine the relationship between audience, digital media and it’s ubiquity in contemporary society.
Now Screening is an exhibition that focuses on providing an alternative slower-paced engagement with everyday digital devices in a world saturated with screen-based communication.
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This is a HomeGround exhibition, produced by the WPCC and supported by Orana Arts. HomeGround is sponsored by Wingewarra Dental.
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OFFICIAL OPENING: Saturday 30 November, 2pm
Image: Landscape (video stills), 2019, dual-channel video installation, duration: 6:32 (loop), dimensions variable. Image courtesy © artist
1080: RABBIT CONTROL
23 November 2024 - 11 May 2025
Using a series of rare images this exhibition explores the environmental impact of the European Rabbit as an introduced species into the Australian landscape. By the 1950s Rabbits had reached plaque proportions across Australia, and attempts to control the rabbit problem, included experiments conducted by the Dubbo Pastures Protection Board with the poison 1080.
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This From the Vault exhibition has been supported by funding from Create NSW.
Image: Photographer Unknown, Trail leading up a hill for 1080 poison baits, c.1953, Central West Local Lands Service, Local Studies Collection, Dubbo Regional Council, 2018_103_PHO
FROM THE VAULT
A WOMAN'S PLACE
10 May 2024 - 4 May 2025
This exhibition explores the stories of three local women of Dubbo, from three different time periods dating from the late 1800s through to the 1940s. The stories of these women reflect a broader discussion around women’s roles in the public sphere.
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Mrs Blanche Soane was a prominent Suffragette, Nurse Mary Adams, the Matron of a Lying-in Hospital, and Mrs ‘Kep’ Wilkins, a prominent producer and organiser in Dubbo’s Theatrical community, how do we understand such prominent and respected local women in an era when it was a firmly held view that a ‘woman’s place’ was in the home?
From the Vault is supported by Create NSW.
Curated by Simone Taylor
​Image: Photographer Unknown, Group portrait of nurses including Mary McDonald, later Matron Adams, Local Studies Collection, Dubbo Regional Council, 2015_222_PHO
YEAR OF TOYS
WASTE 2 ART
8 March - 25 May 2025
Waste 2 Art is an annual community art exhibition and competition that features artworks created by community members using recycled and unwanted materials. The results are imaginative and thought-provoking with the artworks showcasing recycling and sustainable living.
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With this creative use of waste materials, Waste 2 Art also provides an innovative approach to waste education. Schools and community groups take up the challenge and create artworks out of materials that might otherwise be thrown away.
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The theme for this year's exhibition is Toys.
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Dubbo Regional Council is a proud NetWaste member and supports commitment to re-use and recycle through creative expression.
Image: Zachary Craig, Mr Porkbunz, 2024, cardboard, image courtesy of Dubbo Regional Council.
ZANNY BEGG
THESE STORIES WILL BE DIFFERENT
8 March - 25 May 2025
These Stories Will be Different brings together three of the artist’s most significant video installations, including The City of Ladies (with Elise McLeod) 2017, The Beehive 2018, and Stories of Kannagi 2019. Between them, these works reimagine a medieval feminist utopia, probe the unsolved murder of a high-profile anti-gentrification campaigner and explore the connections between love, loss, and language in diasporic communities in Australia.
The videos tell stories, but they also challenge the politics of storytelling itself. Drawing on ancient literary traditions, non-linear timeframes, and computer-generated randomisation, Zanny Begg invites you to see the world differently.
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A UNSW Galleries and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition.
Image: Zanny Begg, Stories of Kannagi (still) 2019. Image courtesy of the artist
TINA PECH
BOOKISH
1 March - 1 June 2025
Why do we like books? Is it just their content we admire, or their look and feel? What makes a book more than a literary object? These are the questions Baradine artist Tina Pech explores in her exhibition, Bookish.
Books historically have been valued as the keepers of knowledge. Books house both information and imagination: they contain our stories, records, secrets, and potentials for growth, insight, and change. While they remain silent communicators, their power is towering, inspiring us to read, absorb, inscribe, and to become story tellers in our own right.
Bookish features works that use traditional and invented construction methods, as well as alternative stitching and materials, to create a collection of book-like sculptures, mutations, and hybrids which push and challenge how we regard books and their functions. Bookish shows works that seek to extend a book’s structure and contents beyond the expected, as well as challenging our perception of books. Bookish shows books as structural vessels able to be deconstructed and reimagined, laying bare a book’s skeletal anatomy while displaying their layers and accentuating their content.
Tina Pech is a fibre textile artist whose creative practice is heavily influenced by the physicality of books, their tactility, warmth, and tangible presence. Through the practice of constructing and deconstructing books, she invites us to explore their physical structure, experimenting and playing with a book's boundaries and anatomy.
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This is a HomeGround exhibition, produced by the WPCC and supported by Orana Arts. HomeGround is sponsored by Wingewarra Dental.
Image: Tina Pech, Book Blossom 1, 2024, altered book sculpture, gesso, acrylic paint. Image courtesy the artist.
PEOPLE PLACES POSSESSIONS
DUBBO STORIES
Permanent Exhibition
The history of Dubbo told through the people who lived here. Stories of hardship, perseverance, ingenuity, tragedy and joy – Dubbo’s past is at once surprising and enlightening.
Telling the story of a place and its people is made easier by examining the myriad of ways we document, express and articulate our experiences. For a museum, the photographs, books, objects and official records help us to record history. The archives held by the WPCC allow community members to access this material for research or general interest. From diaries and ledgers to photographs that transport us back in time, the WPCC Collection provides a unique portal to our past.
Image Credit: Maker unknown, Shoe – Female – Chinese, date unknown. Red satin. Braid edging continues down to the toe. Calico sole with embroidery under the heel. Bird and flower embroidery. Orange tie embroidered in shades of blue. Designed for the custom of bound feet. Collection WPCC.