Bindi Cole's 'How to Vote Part 1' (2008), is a reflection on Indigenous women's experiences and forms part of a series that emerged from a collaboration between herself, sculptor Lorraine Connelly-Northey, and curator/writer Jirra Lulla Harvey.

The work is a play on ethnographic images of indigenous women that were taken by non-indigenous photographers in the 19th Century. In effect, it is a recreation of an early image that has been reconsidered in terms of an Indigenous perspective. The photograph also features Lorraine Connelly-Northey's Stiletto (2008), a consideration of the restrictive powers and dangerous implications of misconceptions about sexuality, and a veiled reference to the strict control of Koori marriages in the past.

'How to Vote Part 1' also considers skin tone, and recalls the racist practice of defining indigenous people in such terms as "full blood" and "quadroon": terms that were subsequently used as determinants of rights.

Bindi Cole is an emerging artist and photographer. In 2007 she won the Victorian Indigenous Art Photography Award and was also a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize (National Portrait, Canberra).

'Recent Plans for the Equal Distribution of Literate People' (2008), is one of six maps proposed by artist Louisa Bufardeci in her series Recent plans for the equal distribution of equality.

In this series Bufardeci lays out some possibilities for the world in terms of imagined 'maps' : countries, randomly placed, are made up of 50 dots each, each dot representing 561,900 people. Each country is free floating, and loose arrows show distribution routes; countries with more than an average of a particular resource redistribute to those who have less. Each country is coloured with matching paths and dots, so it’s clear who is giving and who is receiving. In this way equality is imagined in terms of resource redistribution; this flow, or proposed flow, helps us imagine a utopian world that shares.

Louisa Bufardeci completed a Bachelor of Education (Visual Arts) University of Melbourne 1991, followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 1998 and a Master of Fine Art (Art and Technology) in the School of Art at the Institute of Chicago in 2006. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

Item measurements: 90cm x 90 cm

Lorraine Connelly-Northey is a Waradgeri woman from the Wongaibong language group. Her works are in numerous public and private collections throughout Australia and internationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey is known for her recreations of weaved baskets, dilly bags and other traditional indigenous objects, using found materials, such as scrap metal. 'Lap Lap' (2008), made from steel and barbed wire, is a recreation of a traditional garment that is worn around the groin area: and as such, considers the difficult, or "barbed", field of sexual relations and representations, as well as the danger inherent in negotiating these territories. It is a comment on the way Koori women have been configured in terms of the gender and race.

The sculpture is also used in a photographic work by Bindi Cole, 'Miss Australia' (2008),where the lap-lap is worn by an aboriginal woman burning a bra. Here it takes on a threatening aura, and the lap-lap emerges as a kind of protection, a reclaimed slight which has been turned around on the perpetrators.

The basis of Kate Smith’s work for the 'A Time Like This' exhibition, was an early series of paintings of her mother’s garden, created in situ and from memory, that explored and even satirised nineteenth century ideas of what were socially acceptable subjects for women’s paintings: English gardens, verandahs, poppies, roses and agapanthus, seemingly unaware of the vast Australian landscape beyond.

In 'Sunday Reed is Organic' (2006), we see one of series of works of brief, truncated text appearing in fits and starts across the canvas, and bending the mind with historical and biographical reference. Smith sees herself as a writer first: text and language and semiotic puzzling are foregrounded. Smith doesn’t settle on a solution, rather she puzzles out the different aspects. Her hand drawn, oversized reading blocks are works that directly critique the way art history is taught within the tertiary system. She observes that women artists still rarely make it in to the courses that provide compulsory, canonised overviews of art history; and are instead relegated to women’s and cultural studies, often as electives. (Adapted from catalogue text by Meredith Turnbull).

Kate Smith completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) at the Australian National University and ANU School of Art in 2005. That year she was also the recipient of the ANU School of Art Peter Fay Graduate Award, ANU School of Art/Canberra Contemporary Art Space 6 month Residency Award. She has exhibited nationally.

With 'Desk Construction' (2008), Annie Wu offers a toolbox of ideas and elides the gallery space with the store, library or workshop to create a total environment. Within the gallery rests specially constructed furniture and plants that fit out the space as a living area; a reference section with books, a range of self-made and peer-made publications, and easy to manipulate instructions for making clothes. Each clothing ensemble is accompanied by instructions so that participants may leap from Wu’s instructions to create their own clothes, and creating in the process new uncontrollable contexts. These free resources are also the basis for the development of new, potentially ongoing relationships as the works themselves rejoin the cycle to become possible future content. (Adapted from catalogue text by Kate Rhodes).

Annie Wu is a Melbourne artist, born in Shanghai and currently based in Amsterdam, studying photography and graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Her areas of enquiry and practice centre around 1. the association between art and design – bridging a gap between unintentional aesthetics and ideological function. 2. Creation of a constantly evolving and fluid nature of social constructions, interactions and interventions, by employing the self instructional use of unfamiliar artistic devices. 3 How political outcomes can be achieved by “doing more with less”. Wu has exhibited as an artist, musician, photographer, designer, writer, collaborator and curator.