To look at the art of Tschabala Self is to feel fabric think. Stitched velvet, printed cotton, painted skin: bodies collaged from memory and from life, all the way from Harlem to the Hudson.

The characters that Tschabalala Self paints aren't just portraits, they fold together myth and the everyday They ask how we see and how we're seen. 

In Melbourne for her solo exhibition, Skin Tight at ACCA, Self talks art and politics, fabric and representation and takes us into her experience of New York.

Some landscapes don't just surround us, they get inside us. A windswept farm, a rugged coastline, a cave heavy with shadow: they're places that don't fade, but lodge in the memory.

The work of photographer and video artist Sarah Rhodes, who was part of the ABC's Top 5 Arts program in 2025, explores the emotional registers of place: how landscapes can be more than just backdrops, and can instead become part of who we are.

Sarah was a recent recipient of an honourable mention at the Bowness Photography Prize for her work, Chamber of Projection 1.

To write about art is really to write about looking. About how artists meet the world: what they notice; what slips through; what remains.

In What Artists See, Quentin Sprague turns to twelve Australian artists, but Sprague doesn't just list their works, he lingers with how they see: what pulls at their attention and what do they uncover when the world pushes back?

Speaking with Micheal Do, Quentin interrogates: when we look at art, what are we really seeing?

Two hundred years ago, a French wallpaper pictured the Pacific: the islands and empire in perfect harmony against windless calm seas. But it was decoration. Pure fantasy.

Until artist Lisa Reihana made history flicker — adding ceremony, desire, misunderstanding, and violence.

Her vast video work In Pursuit of Venus [infected] premiered in Auckland, then at the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. She took a 19th-century French wallpaper, once exotic decor, and transformed it into a living panorama.

Reihana talks about what came after that breakthrough and about her latest pieces, at the Sydney Contemporary and Ngununggula.

Nusra Latif Qureshi has built a career extending South Asian painting traditions while pressing on empire, displacement, and desire — revealing how power cloaks itself in colour, and how history leaves its mark on objects.

The House of Irredeemable Objects at MUMA brings together thirty years of Nusra Latif Qureshi’s work — an examination of tradition, history, and the everyday —  alongside a new commission which draws on Monash University's rare books collection. 

Qureshi explores how objects can carry something larger than themselves — a trace, a wound, or a memory — and reminds us that beauty and violence often walk side by side.

Some paintings are sealed off from the world: neat, polished, contained.

But Sophie Cape's canvases feel porous, weathered by the elements themselves. Not so much painted, as unearthed.

Once an elite athlete, Sophie turned to art after devastating injuries.

It's a path that has brought her attention and acclaim, including winning this year's Hadley's Art prize, Australia's richest prize for landscape painting.

Throughout his practice, the German artist Thomas Demand rebuilds the world in paper, meticulously constructing life-sized models of everyday spaces or scenes. Te scene is photographed, and the models destroyed.

Demand is in Australia as the curator of the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project and here, it is the exhibition itself that becomes the artwork.

Inspired by a work by Sol LeWitt, Demand has recreated the lines of the canvas in the three dimensional space of the gallery: walls float, suspended from wires, their skins wrapped in the colours of clay, moss, cobalt, and lemon.

Nicolas Rothwell writes at the edges of things. He's twice won the Prime Minister's Literary Award — for both fiction and non-fiction — and his work slides between both registers: fiction brushes against fact, philosophy slips into story.

His latest novel, Yilkari: A Desert Suite, written with his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, takes readers deep into the Western Desert, showing how Country makes art, how absence reveals, and how silence can heal.

Rothwell reflects on his autodidactic approach to art and on the tension between concealment and revelation in the work from the Western Desert.

William Yang's photographs are part memoir, part invitation. Queer lives, Asian faces, vanished places — all lit with the soft glow of attention.

For writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law discovering Yang's work felt uncanny. Like recognition. Like fate. The sense that someone, somewhere, had lived a version of his life and turned it into light.

For Law, it wasn't just admiration. It was kinship. Two queer Asian men from regional Queensland. Two artists drawn to thresholds: of identity, of family, of desire, of home.

This week on The Art Show, we explore what it means to feel seen in someone else's work, and the unexpected communion that can follow.

In 2020, Aperture magazine invited Garth Greenwell to write about Mark Armijo McKnight's photographs. The images immediately captivated him, offering new possibilities for thinking and feeling.

Their work meets in shared spaces: the erotic, the poetic, desire and restraint, silence and shadow; both illuminating queer lives with honesty and complexity.

What began as an assignment deepened into a deep, loving friendship, one that continues to reshape and expand their inner and outer worlds.