In 1974 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released That’s Entertainment! to celebrate the studio’s 50th anniversary which now, in 2024, marks its 100th year centenary. Perhaps to echo the film’s status as a proto-highlight reel anticipating a legacy, the exhibition of the same name at Animal House is a dedication to Yusi Zang, Tim Woodward, Beth Maslen, Chris Madden, Victoria Stolz, Benjamin Baretto and Trent Crawford who have come together under collective representation by the gallery. Matthew Ware; founder, gallerist, artist, conversationalist, recaller, has amassed this impressive assemblage of artists since the gallery's launch mid-2023, and That’s Entertainment! is a celebration and declaration of Animal House’s commercial profile, underscoring Ware’s commitment to these early-career artists. Adopting an air of old-world, handshake-based professionalism, the gallery is situated within a disused lawyer’s office in Brunswick East. The layout has the claustrophobic pangs of fifty years of paper-pushing in uniform partition blocks, with extended white cubes containing high-set windows that reflect the darkness of the rest of the abandoned office.
On the opening night, the office’s labyrinthine layout created a bottleneck as streams of traffic converged between rooms and extended hallways. Clearly the 1980s lawyers’ office is not equipped for the slow meandering cadence of gallery visitors. Positioned centrally in the first room, Three Aqueous Events features two evaporative cooling fans filled with water that Tim Woodward had collected after the extinguishing of a burning Suzuki Vitara in a Melbourne alleyway. The footage of the burning car bellowing large clouds of black smoke is played on a white Samsung tablet mounted in the office. The fire scene is serene, with the car sitting quietly at the end of the alleyway, dissimilar to usual scenes of car accident action and destruction. The decision to separate this footage from the main installation raises questions about its role in relation to the work. By withholding the immediacy of the imagery from the space where the material aftermath resides, the coolers invite contemplation of speculative material encounters. Woodward’s gesture of repurposing the remnants of a fire to (successfully) cool the gallery space brings attention to the shapeshifting materiality of ruin, resurrection, and matter transformation. The water, once deployed to extinguish flames, now reshapes a new environment by circulating the air. Like lungs, the fans attempt to purify the violent material history in its new aqueous form.
Tim Woodward’s 2019 work Silent Aspiration (Conglomerate Gulp) slightly dampens the white noise coming from the two industrial cooling fans. It comprises two large panels made of acoustic felt arranged in a structured grid format; a muted surface punctuated by vibrant blue, orange, and green squares. The orderly composition and restrained colour palette resemble constructivist sensibilities. The office-core aesthetic is fitting in this disused law office setting, perhaps intentionally. Embedded within the surfaces are stainless steel business card holders nestled with eighteen foreign objects that have been found lodged in peoples’ respiratory systems — mundane items like pistachio shells, glass beads, thumbtacks and buttons. The title Silent Aspiration directly references the medical condition, where food or liquids are unknowingly inhaled into the windpipe and lungs, often without the clear warning signs of coughing or a wet voice. Juxtaposed with the associated definition of ‘aspiration’, the controlled order of the grids and the muted tactile felt panels suggest a sense of static restraint and suppression that likens monotonous office culture to an obstructed airway medical phenomenon.
Two tassels, one pink, one blue, flicker in the grill as the fan hums and ticks. The tassels guide my attention to Beth Maslen’s balanced assemblage Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky, a work that is emblematic of Maslen’s magical and poetic prowess. The Native American proverb that lends the work its title, once referenced in The Sopranos, speaks to the subtle forces that guide and sustain us –- a balance between fragility and resilience. Maslen works with the static in the air and the breeze from the Maribyrnong River like a bowerbird works with bottle caps and plastic pegs. Three panels of a steel drying rack with peeling latex paint stand upright, pulled equally in three directions by a series of beaded wires, hanging effortlessly on the ladder-like structure. The grooves in the floor have been gently made in the installation process, but the perfect balance of the work would have you believe they were already there, found by the legs of the bottom rung of the sculpture. The careful weighted balance resembles a cairn, a human-made pile of stones, typically found marking passages on difficult hiking routes and holding ancient significance as burial and tribute mounds. The magnetic quality and emotional weight of this work is expelled through its self-awareness of its own construction and fortitude as found materials that have been collected and carried around by Maslen in earnest until they would eventually find their place. It feels almost cathartic seeing these clothes horses making a poignant appearance, as I recall them sitting in Maslen’s studio years ago in art school. Upon a subsequent viewing of this show, Matt shook the work, proving its uncontested stability.
Unlike the other large format artworks that punctuate this show, there is a painting that sits quietly, almost overlooked, behind Maslen’s delicately balanced sculpture. That conscientious objector is Yusi Zang’s intimate painting of a sickly sponge-like crumpet. In Crumpet, Zang’s subdued brushwork captures the translucent, glossy tactility of the plastic packaging encasing the crumpets, a striking interplay between the artificial and organic. The mechanical quality of the stamped text over the plastic draws the viewer's attention to the expiration date, a subtle memento mori of the crumpets. Zang’s work often contemplates the benign, the dull, and the impermanence of moments. Crumpet is no exception: the greige tones, reminiscent of a corpse, hint at an impending silent decay, an atmosphere of uninspiring resignation toward the inevitable rotting of the perished crumpets. For me, Zang’s work really speaks to a sense of idleness; a passive withdrawal from everyday life.
By contrast, the largest works in the show are Benjamin Barretto’s View and Scaffolding, which dominate their rooms, floor to ceiling –- one in the main gallery and one in the office space gallery. Barretto mediates a selection of drawings, images and physical objects through a scanner to generate a structural composition from which to start working. In person, the works have an ambiguity present in all abstract painting, some parts defined, others blurred. Through the computer screen the dark lines, a product of digital scanning glitches, have obvious tells. The colours used fade in and out in an inverted palate, the borders of the structural lines have the blocky outlines of a poorly lasso’d drawing, or the blown-out detail of a xeroxed diagram. View looms large diagonally across from Zang’s Crumpet, establishing an almost comical contrast between their vastly differing scales and presence. Teetering between coherence and abstraction, View is characterised by a bold interplay of saturated tones - deep blacks and rich greens - contrasted with flashes of vibrant reds and softer, glowing pinks, content with sitting behind the dark lines. The fragmented composition gives the impression of looking through multiple layers or veils, as if piecing together a partially obscured scene, or a cropped section of a screenshot. Scaffolding, by contrast, offers a cooler palette and a lighter composition, balancing the tangled dark pattern in the centre with sparse blues and whites. The works complement each other, as they should when Baretto’s process involves a kind of cycle where two paintings generate one another. The works are therefore portals to the two different sections of the gallery, illuminating a series of doors and mechanisms that Barretto has used to get from one painting to the other and back until completed. Baretto’s recursive approach mirrors the visual experience of scanning and manipulation, where clarity and coherence emerge from layers of revision and repetition.
Chris Madden’s sculptural installation Anatomy of a Road Violation, with photographs made in collaboration with Edward Dean, introduces the slender hallway of the gallery. Two thin steel beams bow and bend into a soft wave shape, and contained between them are a series of blurry, ripped, partial photographs of a street scene; objects through a window. The sculptural form has become a signature of the artist in recent years, evoking the shape of a road, pipeline or urban artery. For those who know Madden, it is difficult not to associate this work with his recent pedestrian accident that left him with a broken arm. The work presents a narrative told through disjuncture and absence. The assemblage of Madden and Dean’s photographs capture the familiar neon glow of an Ezymart at night, not quite as universal as 7/11, but synonymous with blurry Melbourne city experiences. Buying single cigarettes, being unashamedly watched on a security camera, spending $6 on a bottle of water. The automobile clearcoat over the photograph enhances the hazy images with light trails indicating speed, ambiguity and disjointed memory. Whilst Madden’s incident informs the interpretation, it resists over-contextualisation, opting for a more universal subject matter. The work’s placement in the narrow hallway intensifies its spatial impact, squeezing and warping time into a confined encounter that demands physical proximity. It evokes the drunk glaze of jaywalking, neon glow dominating perception, dilating and compressing how far away the footpath actually is. Perhaps this chosen street corner would have been a more idyllic location for the accident, bathed under blue light glowing off the wet road.
The first time I had ever come across Victoria Stolz’s practice was at another Animal House show in 2023. Stolz’s painting Palimpsest in the Pictures 2: More Pictures exhibition was a showstopper — I was starstruck. I was immediately drawn to its orchestral composition and treatment of the surface. I admired that the painting had a presence that felt larger than life. To me, Stolz’s work seems to speak of a sort of cosmology, an intuitive understanding of the universe articulated through symphonic gestural plays.
The bright white cube lighting of Animal House seems particularly striking in the office, illuminating the reflective and layered qualities of Stolz’s oil on aluminium composite paintings, Loopholes and Amor Fatigue. The aluminium’s reflective surface catches and distorts the light, heightening the unassuming relationship between her gestural layers of paint and the industrial substrate. In Loopholes, Stolz employs sweeping and looping gestures across a predominantly warm palette of reds, purples, and ochres. Suggesting a process of accumulation and erosion, the surface reveals layers of paint applied and scraped away, creating a tactile, geological quality. Stolz’s mark-making opens metaphorical slits or gaps onto the gallery walls, acting as loopholes — small openings or escape points. The painting's elongated horizontal composition magnifies these moments of visual interventions, a portal like quality that offers glimpses into something beyond the materiality of the painting itself. As you move throughout the room the layers oscillate, making it difficult to view the paintings the same way twice. Directly parallel to Loopholes, is an aquatic counterpart, Amor Fatigue, with its cooler, more subdued palette of blues, greens, and purples. The reflective aluminium substrate intensifies this aquatic, atmospheric effect, as light interacts with the surface to create an ethereal glow; conjuring imagery of rippling fog, clouds or marine animals. Amid the composition, four aluminium planes of squares emerge into the foreground. This interaction fosters a sense of ‘becoming’ as the boundaries between form and formlessness dissolve into a continuous transformation.
Trent Crawford’s Velocities IV (Tullio Crali) initially veils itself as a photograph, but is, in fact, a digitally assembled composition. The work is based on the structural composition of Tullio Crali’s Diving into the City (1939), one of the hallmarks of the Futurist movement of Aeropittura. More specifically, the genre of Aeropittura was developed to align themselves closely to the values championed by fascists in their effort towards a technologically modernised vision of Italy. The futurists saw cities as a machine and sought to supersede the continuities of nature. Diving into the City portrays the futurists’ obsession with speed, velocity, and progress, as the pilot is depicted as mesmerised from his bird’s eye view, unable to stop himself from plunging directly into a labyrinth cityscape.
This underlying ideological entanglement perhaps informs Crawford’s response to our current technological condition. Crawford replaces the birds-eye focal point of the pilot and plane with a young bird and its nest precariously perched off a concrete ledge. Flattening the vantage point of the image, the flash ruptures the works perceived photographic honesty, revealing the bird’s nest to be encased in two layers of glass, in front and behind. The naturalistic image is further disrupted by an inconspicuously hidden debossed cross centred in the work. Hidden biblical suggestions are no strangers to Crawford’s oeuvre. Once the cross is noticed, the work takes on a foreboding undertone, perhaps a suggestion to a separation between the magic or gift of life and the futurist cities we now live in. The subtlety of the debossed cross makes its discovery almost revelatory, an act that mirrors the work’s contention with an awakening, or the unveiling of a deeper truth. Together the cross and the flash jolts our passive consciousness into confronting the encroachment of technology now and its fascist authoritarian legacy.
Images of banality and mundane utility linger because of their constant, understated familiarity within an ordinary existence. The indifference and uninspired withdrawal from Zang’s intimate painting Crumpet extends into her life-size painting of her bedroom ceiling fan. Nothingness Follows Like a Giant Shadow depicts the blades of a ceiling fan, their stark geometry rendered in stale, dismal tones of grey, beige and black. Presented from an angled perspective, the work suggests the vantage point of Zang herself, lying beneath the fan in bed as though caught in the inertia of bed rotting. Zang’s unflinching honesty provides a cathartic release for the conclusion of the show.
Echoing the variety-show format of the iconic MGM film’s title sequence, this exhibition’s narrative darts between drama, intimacy and mystery. A brief moment of exhale, idleness and pause is necessary to grasp That's Entertainment!’s theatrics, conceptual rigour and its unrelenting demand for attention. Whilst the show can occasionally verge on the overwhelming, it’s a refreshing twist to see these artists backed with a resoluteness that bites through Melbourne art’s frequent tongue-in-cheek-ness. This intense momentum feels intentional, amplifying Matt’s eagerness to situate Animal House within the spectacle of Melbourne’s commercial art landscape ahead of a debut appearance at the 2025 Melbourne Art Fair. An audacious showcase it will be.
Sueann Chen is an art writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.