Pitched as ‘Ulterior Motives in Contemporary Art’, Disorder Disorder is running until November 14 at Penrith Regional Gallery. It’ll be well worth the trip out west of Sydney: the Australian, Japanese, American and European cast reads like a warriors of street art roundup and includes Mike Giant, Ed Templeton, Anthony Lister [artwork above], Ozzie Wright, and Jonathan Zawada.

Curated by Joseph Allen — the man behind countless Monster Children Gallery shows – the exhibition is rooted in street art and pop culture, with artists whose work has evolved within graffiti, skateboarding, tattooing, comics, surfing, commercial art and heavy metal. It’s the first large-scale exhibition of these artists, and the art of these sub-cultures, in an Australian public institution. Lectures and workshops are included in an accompanying events program. Get there.

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Stranglehold, at Sydney’s First Draft Gallery, is an exhibition of new drawings and screenprints by James Jirat Patradoon, exploring his take on fantasy hyper-masculinity with portraits inspired by slasher movie villains, pro wrestlers, biker gangs, and Elvis. This series examines notions of deferred mascullinities: confused and misdirected rites of passage informed more by cartoons and action heroes than by reality itself. Drawn in a style influenced by the comics and cartoons of his youth, Jirat Patradoon’s images of fist-fights and tough-guy bravado consider the idea of violence as the purest form of masculine statement and its integral place in the male mythos. The exhibition opens on February 4.

The controversial and multifaceted International contemporary art exhibition Trailblazers hits Sydney this month. Boutwell Draper Gallery will grace multimedia works by pioneering Australian, American and European artists from November 19 onwards. I’m thrilled to see groundbreaking pieces by Ben Frost, Kill Pixie, Copyright and Cleon Patterson [above], to name a few. The vast array of paintings, photography, sculpture, installation, video and digital arts is on display until December 13. C’mon, you know you want to culture your soul.

In the current series of paintings, Cordial Christ Blues, to be unveiled in an exhibition at Sydney’s Arthouse Gallery between April 9 and 26, local artist Damien Kamholtz creates a frisson between faith and fable. The knowing innocence of Alice in her Wonderland meets the wisdom and forbearance of heroic sagas from the Bible. The great and mythic stories that are high moral tales of the conflict between good and evil are played out on canvasses washed with pale glazes that reveal as in shadowed memories, the ghosts of supplicants. The iconic ritual of halos and the key players of Christ and the Madonna are there with a minor cast of saints but while they show us faces of beauty and innocence there is a predatory darkness that glitters in the wings of this theatre that is both sacred and profane.