In June, Nicholas Smith put on a group show at his eponymous Sydney gallery that explored nostalgia – as an emotional force, a cultural force and as an interrogation of “the act of remembering itself”.
“Right now, I think nostalgia resonates so strongly because we’re in a moment of cultural flux,” Smith says. “Looking back can feel like a way to steady ourselves.”
The show, titled Yesterday, featured 19 artists who revisited “personal and shared histories”, Smith explains. “Some reconstructed childhood memories, others delved into the aesthetics of past eras, forgotten traditions and mediums or the transient nature of human connection.”
As the exhibition at N Smith Gallery proved, nostalgia is a multifaceted thing. It’s an emotion. It’s a lens. It’s an aesthetic. It’s a narrative device. It’s a cultural phenomenon. It’s individual. It’s collective.
Nostalgia has long been expressed, examined and interrogated by artists, from the sentimentality-fuelled Romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries to the postmodern photography of Cindy Sherman, who used nostalgic tropes to critique, skewer and upend, in curator Eva Respini’s words, the “artifice of identity”.
Australian artists are similarly engaged with nostalgia, using it overtly and subtly, with warmth and with cynicism, in painting, photography, installation and beyond. Six of them share their work below.
Casey Chen
Nostalgia is ... something personal for me. But I think it’s also an important part of a collective shared experience that is relatable between people.
My art practice draws heavily upon my personal lived experience. I’m inspired by feelings of sentimentality and the memory of the things that have stayed with me, and which I’m curious about. Nostalgia is an overarching theme that I regularly circle back to and reference. Looney Tunes, the Beatles, Journey to the West – they’re sincere and irreverent mashups I throw into my work. I borrow elements from pop culture as a light-hearted and accessible way of presenting a narrative that speaks to a collective shared experience between me and the audience. I draw on my feelings of nostalgia as a way to see the humour in everything, and as a way to resolve disparate themes in my work and unify my art practice with that of longstanding traditions of ceramics craft-making.
Casey Chen, Lollybomb 3, 2025
Casey Chen, A portrait of my personal pop-cultural pantheon, 2025
Casey Chen, Heavy metal 2, 2025
Thea Anamara Perkins
Nostalgia is … powerful.
It is a vividity of past or even a reimagining. What we yearn for can illuminate our shared values. An intangible attachment that lingers through shifting times.
Thea Anamara Perkins, Sisters 2, 2024
Thea Anamara Perkins, Dreaming, 2024
Thea Anamara Perkins, Atherreyurre, 2023
This article has been abridged,
