Kate Newby’s sculptures, which can take the form of wind chimes, rocks, puddles, tiles, shells, bricks, and textiles, emerge from observations of her everyday surroundings. For her 2018 installation at Kunsthalle Wien, I can’t nail the days down, Newby covered the gallery’s floor with bricks embedded with coins, bottle caps, glass, and branches collected from the surrounding area. In her recent yearlong project A puzzling light and moving. (2019) at the lumber room in Portland, Oregon, she produced a range of site-responsive works, such as a puddle embedded in a concrete patio that reflected the outside environment. For her current exhibition at Fine Arts, Sydney, Newby uses clay, glass, bronze, and wire to craft an environment of mundane objects and subtle gestures that refine viewers’ perception of the gallery space to reveal a dialectical play of interior and exterior. For Bring Everyone (2019), which lends the exhibition its title, Newby replaced several panes of glass in the balcony doors with handmade ones embedded with a number of holes. The crystalized pattern of the glass blurs the colors of the outside world, in contrast with the sharper, unfiltered images that can be observed through the holes. As well as allowing …

A cactus in a terracotta pot stands beside a laptop playing music through a speaker. The balcony doors are wide open. A cool breeze prompts me to the terrace. I see a brick building, leafy trees, and people crossing the street. I can hear foliage rustling. I look around the room, scrutinizing what at first glance seems insignificant. The computer alone on the floor implies someone’s absence. The domestic environment invites me to sit in front of the laptop and watch a music video that is hardly worth mentioning because within a few seconds my eyes turn towards the sky. I see, in the course of few minutes, an airplane, two common mynas, and a magpie fly by. The sky turns gray. It seems that it’s going to rain. Another track starts, a new rhythm that catches my attention. It’s reggaeton, loud and festive. It is 3:50 p.m. in Sydney, or 6:50 a.m. in Berlin. Based in Berlin, Juliette Blightman is known for calling attention to the subjective experience of time and for using personal objects and images of friends or family members in her performances, installations, portraits, drawings, and films. She is of a generation of artists—also including Kate Newby, …