Featured Image: Tony Windberg, Wonders of the World VII (detail), 2022, conte crayon, oil. Photograph: Rob Baker. Courtesy: the artist and Bunbury Regional Art Gallery.

Worlds collide as past and present merge in Wonders of the Worlds. Images of antiquity – Roman ruins, Greek temples, the Pyramids and Petra – are resurrected from black and white photographs of century old volumes of Wonders of the Past. These combine with scenes of a wild terrain of sand and stone, a new frontier, the pristine landscapes of Mars.

Windberg’s innovative use of materials and techniques connects the artworks to his subject through a mix of traditional and non-conventional art materials. Iron oxides reflect the rusty hues of Mars, chalk and marble dust the limestone temples and pyramids. Surfaces and textures are methodically built up then ‘weathered’ to suggest the passage of time.

In this thought-provoking exhibition of contrasts and contradictions, the rise and fall of empires reveals our strengths and weaknesses, our achievements and vulnerabilities. Human civilisation has built great monuments and achieved extraordinary heights as we look to other worlds. Do we have the power to save our own?