Visceral Compassion: Images of War Artist George Gittoes

Within the canon of Australian art history there has been a clear tendency to repress issues that emerge when artists explore religious and spiritual subject matter. Art history, like other disciplines, enjoys the subjectivity of its cultural framing and shares a common tendency in our culture to silence speech about religious or speculative discourses

Images of Religious Significance in Recent Australian Art

One of the aims of this conference is to sponsor a more active relationship between the various forms of artistic expression. It is therefore with some trepidation that I begin this analysis of present themes in the visual arts with a literary reflection. From the unlikely source of Rudyard Kipling comes this observation on the difficult relationship between religion and the arts: Our Father Adam, sat under a tree and scratched with a stick in the mould And so, the first rude sketch that the world has seen was joy to his mighty heart. Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves It's pretty, But is it art? The relationship between the visual arts and religion lies in a geography more like a battlefield. Apart from the current debates that belie both fields of study in the aftermath of post-structuralist approaches to theories of knowledge, the relationship between theology and the visual arts has been marked more by a war of images than by peaceful co-operation

Properties of STAT1 and IRF1 enhancers and the influence of SNPs

Abstract Background STAT1 and IRF1 collaborate to induce interferon-γ (IFNγ) stimulated genes (ISGs), but the extent to which they act alone or together is unclear. The effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on in vivo binding is also largely unknown. Results We show that IRF1 binds at proximal or distant ISG sites twice as often as STAT1, increasing to sixfold at the MHC class I locus. STAT1 almost always bound with IRF1, while most IRF1 binding events were isolated. Dual binding sites at remote or proximal enhancers distinguished ISGs that were responsive to IFNγ versus cell-specific resistant ISGs, which showed fewer and mainly single binding events. Surprisingly, inducibility in one cell type predicted ISG-responsiveness in other cells. Several dbSNPs overlapped with STAT1 and IRF1 binding motifs, and we developed methodology to rapidly assess their effects. We show that in silico prediction of SNP effects accurately reflects altered binding both in vitro and in vivo. Conclusions These data reveal broad cooperation between STAT1 and IRF1, explain cell type specific differences in ISG-responsiveness, and identify genetic variants that may participate in the pathogenesis of immune disorders