Certainly one of our annual favourites, Art to Crow About is an exhibition put together every year by Skills Options at Kurrajong Waratah.

On offer is a wonderful array of artworks which truly reflect the talent and creativity of artists with disability from across the Riverina, with contributions from Wagga, Leeton, West Wyalong and Temora.

From its humble beginnings as a little exhibition called ArtAbility way back in 2005, nine years of hard work and innovation have seen the show grow from strength to strength, with a name change and a fresh new look in 2010.

Art to Crow About has become a much loved institution, and their opening nights are an essential event on Wagga’s cultural calendar.

Last year, Art to Crow About made the move from the E3 art space to the much larger Links Gallery, within the main exhibition space at the Wagga Art Gallery.

Allowing more space and a longer exhibition period, we can now experience a larger range of artworks and themes from the artists we’ve come to know and love over the years.

Once again this year’s exhibition features a tremendous range of work in many different techniques and artforms. While the works may be diverse in style and form, they all demonstrate the artists’ shared passion and commitment to their art, in a celebration of their ability.

Also on display and only open for one more week in our National Art Glass Gallery is internationally acclaimed glass artist Emma Varga, presenting her compelling response to our planet’s ecological crises, in the exhibition Virtual Garden.

This stunning exhibition features a range of recent works created by the artist to raise awareness of the risks we face.

Emma Varga is fascinated by the clarity and transparency of glass, and the possibilities of suspending within each work imagery inspired by nature. Varga’s consummate skills, as shown in Virtual Garden, have been acquired from her long experience working with traditional Venetian, Czech and Scandinavian glass techniques.

The multiplicity of glass art techniques that Emma Varga uses is essential to achieve her goals.

Because of her deep connection with the environment and the natural world, these sculptural objects allure, define and connect with the viewer: and turn help convey the emotional rapport that Emma Varga holds with this fine art medium.

Staying on the subject of exhibitions coming to a finale, make sure you don’t miss local photographer Joel Markham’s exhibition The Quest: The Pursuit of Meaning, now on display in the E3 art space at Wagga Art Gallery until the end of this weekend.

Joel Markham is an arts student, practitioner and educator with degrees in arts, teaching and graphic design, currently pursuing a Master of Arts Practice (Photomedia) at the Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University.

The two-year project of The Quest uses photography to explore the question of meaning and to detail what actually constitutes a meaningful life.

At the beginning of the project, Joel challenged himself “to list the primary sources of meaning in my life, and in looking at the list that eventually emerged, I wondered why I had never written anything like it before. Significantly, what I also recognised – because of the personal nature of the material, no doubt – was the project’s burgeoning status as a self-portrait”.

“But The Quest is not exclusively about me. While the photographs in the exhibition are personal statements that relate to my own quest for meaning, I trust that they will speak to other people as well, and encourage them to stop and reflect on what constitutes meaning in their lives.”

In the main gallery space we still have on show the survey show Home Again: Heath Franco, Works 2011-2014, featuring a specially constructed room in the middle of the main gallery which houses four constantly looping video works on screens both within its interior and upon the external walls.

These "psychological portraits" of suburban life are at once compelling, disturbing and often hilarious. Using a mish-mash of readily found materials to create props and costumes, the resulting exaggerated characters (all played by Franco himself) and bizarre worlds they inhabit are oddly familiar.

Sharing the main gallery space is Con/sequence: Suites, multiples and narratives, an in-house curated exhibition drawn from our Margaret Carnegie print collection. The show explores the many ways in which artists have explored the unfolding of time and space, as well as concepts of the singular and the multiple, through the medium of printmaking.

Upstairs in the Margaret Carnegie Gallery we present the touring exhibition Hide and Seek: self-portraits from the Cunningham Dax Collection; an extraordinary exhibition that brings the viewer face-to-face with the most potent yet enigmatic form of self-expression.

This gripping exhibition explores the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed in self-portraiture.

The four dozen self-portraits brought together for this moving exhibition includes works on paper, sculptures, textiles, multi-media and paintings that traverse the allusive and fluctuating territory of self-perception, bringing forth totem creatures, symbolic incarnations, monstrous visions and palpable internal pain.

Hide and Seek is brought to  Wagga by the Melbourne-based Dax Centre, home of the Cunningham Dax Collection, which comprises over 15,000 artworks by people with experience of mental illness or trauma – one of the three largest of its kind in the world.

And while you’re visiting, why not pop into the Gallery Shop? This weekend we’re launching our spring sale, with reductions of up to 40 per cent on a wide range of beautiful and enticing items.

Start early for Christmas – but be quick, this sale is only on for three weeks.

Main Gallery

* Home Again: Heath Franco Works 2011-2014: Until October 5

* Con/sequence: Suites, multiples and narratives: Until October 12

Links Gallery

* Art to Crow About: Until September 28

National Art Glass Gallery

* Emma Varga: Virtual Garden: Until September 28

Margaret Carnegie Gallery

* Hide and Seek: self-portraits from the Cunningham Dax Collection: Until October 26

E3 art space

* Joel Markham: The Quest: The Pursuit of Meaning: LAST DAY

Applications close: Links Gallery and the E3 art space

When: Tuesday 30 September, 5:00pm

Where: Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

Inquiries: 6926 9660, gallery@wagga.nsw.gov.au,                       wagga.nsw.gov.au/gallery

Tuesday to Saturday: 10am – 4pm

Sunday: 10am – 2pm

Closed Mondays

Wagga Art Gallery is a cultural facility of Wagga City Council