Sarah Low, A Wild and Fragile Coast  Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy VIC 18.04.24 – 05.05.24 On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, I run out of adjectives and exhaust all expletives. The intensity of the landscape seems to ask for nothing less than a total obliteration of the self; a sacrifice of one’s body plunging into the turbulent […]

Futures Gallery, Collingwood, VIC Alice Ramsden – Murmurations 06.04.24–04.05.24  The blue in Quiescence embodies what the title suggests: a stillness, a latency, a tenuous space between calm and activity. Fading and blending into the surrounding hues, it seems a dampened blue, reminiscent of water damage. A blue conceded, yet, also, a blue birth. A blue […]

For Magnetic Topographies, a social practice becomes a place-based practice becomes a compost made up of new friendships and knowledge. A practice that is playfully unassuming yet deeply anti-institutional: meet your friends, go for a walk, see what happens. 

Cache, Melbourne  Clara Joyce – Breathing and Chaos 6.4.24 – 7.4.24 I’d love you even more if you came with me. I was underway, underweight and emotionally charged entering the building. With bleached streaks and big pillows under your painting desk, I’ve followed you ever since you melted my legs, right in front of me […]

I felt completely unable to start this piece of writing. Even the slightest murmur could have salvaged my muted despair. But silence entombed me underneath this unceremonious mound of doubt, where I could only hear the hissing noise of total emptiness. Every sentence felt clunky, every thought irrelevant, every metaphor nonsensical. My world was blank […]

Roberta Joy Rich, The Purple Shall Govern, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 03 November – 31 December 2023 I enter through the PICA Hub (Activity Space). Painted purple, the room heaves with the collective grief that has amassed in the six weeks since the exhibition’s opening. “Free Gaza” is etched in chalk provided by the […]

Dream Gallery, Pakenham  Hana Earles & Anabel Robinson 27.11.23 – 07.12.23 So I’m in Pakenham, in the middle of an empty office-turned-studio, in the middle of a field, perhaps too caffeinated, and staring at some art. Audrey chaperoned the four of us up from the city in her Subaru Forester accompanied by her dog, Ruby. […]

John Nixon, Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints, Geelong Gallery Saturday 18 November 2023 to Monday 11 March 2024. The distillation of an entire artistic practice and career into four decades of prints made between 1982-2020 suggests a lens through which to focus our appreciation on just one aspect of the life of Australia’s most significant […]

Galleries: BLINDSIDE (Melbourne) Exhibitions: Alex Hobba, Cockfighter’s Ghost There is something threatening about having a wide range of interests. Information aesthetics seem poised to overwhelm you with junk. Organising quickly becomes a profession and a chore, the logics of advertising and marketing simultaneously grow more obvious and more oblique. Advertising as a discipline is predicated […]

In the lead up to un Projects’ 20 year anniversary, we hosted Language Ecologies, a day of panel discussions, readings, and performances that explored the multiple ways language and writing emerges from, and shapes, artistic practice. Situated in James Nguyen’s exhibition ‘Open Glossary’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Language Ecologies fostered discussions on […]

As we walk into the gallery, Kai tells me it’s Car Wash’s fifth birthday this year — a fact I find difficult to believe. Located in West Melbourne, the abandoned-car-wash-turned-gallery has been the site of countless self-organised exhibitions, gigs and parties, while somehow always evading the scrutiny of local council and building owners (if they […]

Galleries: Cathedral Cabinet, Gertrude Glasshouse Exhibitions: Victoria Stolz, no external; Francis Carmody, A Relic Remains There is a pull across the mismatched grids of the urban metropolis. From the purpose-built contemporary art space of Gertrude Glasshouse to the appropriated commercial window of Cathedral Cabinet, the allure of myth and meaning is the preoccupation of two […]

Gallery: FUTURES Gallery Exhibition: Sarah Drinan, Flesh Boundaries When I arrive at FUTURES the gallery-sitter is eating a bowl of soup alone at the front desk. It is quiet and I feel awkward about interrupting lunch so I walk straight into the show. In Spring, the first of Sarah Drinan’s paintings I see on entry, […]

Hyacinth, MelbourneCarmen-Sibha Keiso and Emily HansonOctober 13 – 31, 2023 At Hyacinth, I am eyeing the cracked and conspicuously unlatched floor-to-ceiling windows that one could plausibly lean on and fall through, down six floors of the Nicholas Building to certain death – an unfortunately fitting image given the rental precarity of the gallery, as evinced […]

Gallery: Rubicon ARI Exhibition: Sophie Cox, Protest and Survive The gallery-goer accustomed to skipping over exhibition labels and texts might just be compelled to stop and read by Protest and Survive, Sophie Cox’s ode to craftivism exhibited at Rubicon ARI. Thirteen textile works hang neatly and cleanly on the walls of the gallery space, but […]

Bus Projects, MelbourneJames Ashley, Alex Bienstock, Bradford Kessler, Adam Lehrer, Emily Ličen, Charlie Robert, Samm Sutton, Chelsea YoungAugust 31 – September 23 My ancestors come from a country called Bohemia. Montmartre was its capital. Courbet, Lautrec, Krebber, Bacher were its heads of state. Nihilism, its imperious national anthem. One day in 2010 the clock tower […]

Sydney Contemporary 2023, Carriageworks 07-10 September, 2023 Buyers in Sydney only want one thing – paintings. This is about as much as I knew about the commercial art world before walking into Sydney Contemporary 2023. Admittedly, it is artist-run projects that I naturally gravitate towards. In our current wits-end moment where market deregulation and mass […]

Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne Gabriella D’Costa, Christina May Carey, Julien Comer-Kleine, Kate Wallace, and Skye Malu Baker Curated by David Sequeira and Hee Joon Youn 1 – 30 September, 2023 The bureaucrat has flown the cubicle, headed oceanside. Artist Gabriella D’Costa is in motion, departing Melbourne’s city grid on a pilgrimage for sediments […]

Gertrude Studio Program Vanity Project Charles and Laura sit down with Gertrude Studio Artist and man who wears many hats, Francis Carmody, in a new commission for un Extended. They dive deep into Francis’ practice, and reveal the man behind the alibi. Francis’ compulsion to curiosity suits Vanity Project just fine, after all we have podcasted from far […]

On the Jump In – Pepsi® Moments, 2017. Prologue to Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness, 2022. In a Q&A after Soda Jerk’s screening of Hello Dankness (2022) at the Capitol Cinema for the Melbourne International Film Festival, filmmakers Dan and Dom Angeloro posed the rhetorical question: ‘Can there be satire after Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi®ad?’ Ultimately, Hello […]

FUTURES, Melbourne. never together Lara Chamas, Matilda Davis, Christopher Duncan, Evangeline Riddiford-Graham, Fiona Williams. Curated by Victoria Wynne-Jones. Looking at the appeal or influence of magic and mysticism in aesthetics today, one wonders why? Especially given that — as Mitch Therieau writes in Vibe, Mood, Energy — the language of mysticism emerged in reaction to […]

Gertrude Studio Program The Gertrude Studio Program is one of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary art residencies. This year, 182 artists applied, eight were selected, and ONE sat down with Clam & Jackie Bam to eat hot chips and shoot the sh*t. Narrm’s resident PC shock jocks were delighted to chat with Georgia Morgan aka @scorpiopork about […]

Gertrude Projection Festival X Composite Space Hit List: Greatest HitsTim Hardy, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Gabrielle Skye Nehrybecki, Harry Hughes, Moss Lasica Wood 3rd August, 2023 It seems as though we are living in an aesthetic climate where the old is not old for very long; before style is reappropriated, refashioned and recycled into something resembling “newness”. […]

Prompted by un Magazine’s General Manager, I attended a screening of Interview With The Vampire at ACMI with an introduction by critic and historian Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. In her introduction, Heller-Nicholas contextualised this queer coded film with the zeitgeist of the 90s and the oeuvre of Anne Rice. She also touched on the apocalyptically bad sequel Queen of […]