FBi's Canvas

Are politicians saying one thing to you, and something totally different to someone else? Matthew Landauer and Henare Degan from the Open Australia Foundation, are working on making politics lot more transparent.

Sam James is a video artist who has been re-visiting his work from the past to discovery how they have evolved over time, re-informing his reality. He joined Nell Greco in the studio to discuss his works.

Liz Ann MacGregor has no doubt made many, many dreams come true in the art world. This week, however, it’s been her turn. You might have heard that work began on the $50 million expansion of the MCA this week and we were lucky enough to have the MCA’s director on the line to tell us why she and Sydney should be so thrilled.

David Caon is a leading industrial designer who’s put his talents to everything from BMX bike furniture, to chairs made of carpet, to a series of space-capsule-esque optical illusion vases called Mr Impossible and the swanky furnishings of a Qantas business lounge in Hong Kong. He’s currently showcasing with emerging designers but I think we could say that he’s fully emerged and walking very convincingly on design dry land.

For all the talk about new media and new technology changing the world, if you want to get people interested, you have to tell a good story. Lynette Wallworth uses a mix of video, short film, photography and sound - basically new media - to create wordless, but entirely seductive narratives. She’s been hailed as one of the few artists with the ability to effectively intertwine visual art and cinema.

Bikies, cock-rockers, malls and men’s clubs; Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance and Jackson Pollock’s fatal car crash; boy bands at Bondi; the undead; and even a public intervention on a Sydney Starbucks. My next guest has dominated Sydney art for a decade. Indisputably the kings of dress up and drag, the Kingpins have turned their attention to fashion. Matt Levinson spoke to a quarter of the group - a kingpin? Techa Noble.

Have you ever come across a work of art that's so technically incredible you can't conceive how it was made, that blew your mind in its execution, and yet you still walked away feeling hollow in some way - as if nothing had changed? It's kind of like meeting a very attractive person who says all the right things and still manages to say nothing - it's puzzling, because you WANT to like them so badly. The Ordinary Collective joined Anna Burns to talk about their mission: avoiding hollow beauty in pursuit of the beautiful ordinary.

At first glance, the childhood diorama and the medium of 16mm film may seem worlds apart but to Greg Godhard, these fantastical mediums are an irresistible mix. Greg joined Anna Burns in the studio to discuss his latest work.

All of a sudden being Welsh is very much on the radar. A bloodless coup put Julia Gillard up as our first female Prime Minister. But closer to home, a small troupe of actors and theatre makers have reworked Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas's classic Under Milk Wood for a Sydney stage. Zoe Norton Lodge and Vanessa Hughes are part of Bambina Borracha, a Sydney University based theatre company.

Families are strange things. You can feel comfortable for ages, sure of where you stand, with your parents, your brothers or sisters, maybe even kids, and then something happens that just rocks everything. From the outside it might seem like nothing, but it's amazing how easy it is to shake those solid bonds to the core. Fiona McGregor explores one of those moments in her new book, Indelible Ink, and it's truly a Sydney story that's split between richly tended gardens in Sirius Cove on the lower north shore, and the warehouses and terraces of Kings Cross and Surry Hills.

So much time, planning, effort and money - and back room deals, of course - go into planning. But imagine if you had the opportunity to be part of the 'building' process without having to get your hands dirty. Well, a group of 10 Sydney artists are working on it, with a project called Air City. It's an inflatable architecture, but it's part of the public lab at this year's Underbelly festival, so it's a work in progress - three of the artists, Tully Arnot, Charles Dennington and Xiaofu Wang joined Matt Levinson to discuss how it was going.

How often do you think about the fact that Australia’s currently at war? Allied troops have been fighting in the Middle East off and on for twenty years, but for most of us those distant deserts are little more than brief video footage of sandy landscapes that we absorb before the weather on the evening news. We’re bombarded with images of the area but we rarely engage with what they really mean in an enduring and thoughtful way. Phillip George who wants us to contemplate that strange contradiction.

Starting up an independent magazine is a big job. And these days it’s usually driven by a passionate interest in some niche area like, say, music, film, fashion or books, and to be honest, it’s more likely to wind up as a blog. But there’s a new magazine in town, and it’s a long one, full of culture, arts, music, fashion, poetry and stories. It’s called PAN Magazine, and Matt Levinson spoke to two of the ladies behind the project, Emma Dallas and Anastasia Freeman.

In an art exhibition, the artists are always the star of the show but do we ever consider why they're the star? Who creates the exhibition and how do they know where to best display a work so its exhibited correctly? Claire Lewis is an assistant curator at the MCA who is about to open a group show at First Draft Gallery that she's curated herself and she joined Emma Swift on Canvas.

You know that scene in American Beauty where the neighbour slash love interest shows Thora Birch the video he's taken of a plastic bag wending and warping its way in the wind and he says it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen? It's a moment people loved to poke fun at. But there's a lot to be said for finding beauty in the discarded, banal little fragments that everyday life is filled with, and Emma Swift was joined on the line by Vin Ryan, a Melbourne-based visual artist who's spent a great deal of time doing exactly that.

Sometime in the past year or 3 we passed a milestone. Around the world, more of us are living in cities than aren't. And looking around this city, like many others, it's a scene of grey, black and mushroom coloured structures. In many ways, that landscape of architectural structures and shapes has fired the work of our next guest. Caz Haswell is a sculptor, although she works in two dimensions as well as the more common three. And in recent shows, her work has become a whole lot more organic.

Years ago, I saw Aphex Twin play a show in Sydney. Kicking back on a lounge chair tapping the laptop in front of him, he seemed barely aware of the raucous scene of a crowd going crazy, several giant sized soft toys racing around the stage, and the overwhelming cacophony of his bleeps and beats. After the gig, people speculated he was playing computer games - he was so disengaged from the show. That plays into his 'whatever' kind of public profile, but it won't be all that foreign from anyone who goes to electronic gigs. But it wasn't always that way. And one artist working at something quite different is Pia Van Gelder.

Graffiti is illegal - there's no question about it - but seeing the work of Sydney street artists like Beastman, Phibs, Jumbo & Zap or Ears, it's instantly clear they're not just punks tagging walls for the sake of it. Their work adds colour, texture and life to the tapestry of our city, and one guy that recognises their contribution is artist, beatboxer and film-maker Luke Cavalan, otherwise known as LC Beats.

Pop up shops have been the buzz phenomenon this past year or so - and they're mostly an opportunity for labels to get rid of stock quickly, or a cheap outlet for new retailers. But a couple of sisters have taken the concept and seriously shifted it, making what they've called "a fantasy dress up box" that's inspired by some surprising stars. Rachel and Claire Fuller are the proprietors of Bams & Ted, and they joined Matt Levinson on Canvas.

One of the biggest names at this year's Sydney Writers Festival is Lionel Shriver. In an almost 30-year writing career she's turned her sometimes cruel and always exacting eye to high school massacres, marital infidelity and her new novel, So Much For That dives into the meltdown that is the US Health Care system. Shriver joined Elmo Keep to talk about her 'lean and mean' years as a relatively unknown author, her years working as a journalist, and the future of journalism in general.