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 […]
This title, “Editorial Feelings”, rips off the recently published Curatorial Feelings, a collection of texts by Eloise Sweetman and co-edited by Jo-ey Tang in 2021. Tang’s editorial introduction proposes that Sweetman calls ‘out her “curatorial feelings” juxtaposes and unites the two modes of engagement: as a curator and as a sentient being.’[^1] This sentiment produces […]
Kaiela Arts Shepparton Indigenous Futurisms YIRRAMBOI, 4-14 May 2023 The rustling soundscape of trees and birds, accompanied by the rich vibration of the yidaki and the flute, transported viewers into the worlds of the Kaiela Arts young creatives in a new community-led project, Indigenous Futurisms. Led by Dixon Patten, Tammy-Lee Atkinson, and Cienan Muir with […]
In the days before you were born, RISING was called Melbourne Festival. A sedate affair, Melbourne Festival was where the dowagers and their corporate captains of industry husbands would celebrate themselves, at exclusive invitation only opening night soirees to the ballet and the theatre. There, the high-net-worth individuals might partake in the schmooze and compare […]
Sutton Projects Caesar Florence-Howard 27 May – 17 June Earnest pastiche. It seems like a paradox. And yet the paintings in Caesar Florence-Howard’s self-titled exhibition opening at Sutton Projects last week seem to have drawn these terms into a new formal economy. The exhibition consists of three accumulative, large-scale paintings on canvas. The three paintings, […]
Gallery: Asbestos Exhibition: very beautiful chemicals that produce very stylish results in people’s mental functions Artists: Edward Dean & Brayden van Meurs the following document is a letter from poet daniel ward written to Edward Dean and Brayden Van Meurs in response to their current exhibition very beautiful chemicals that produce very stylish results in […]
Gallery: Arts House Exhibition: Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ What I am struck by when I enter Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ at Arts House is the darkness.[^1] I mistake black curtains for exits and entry points, stumble into dark corners that lead nowhere. Darkness blankets vision, so that colour is renewed, broken, so that sound becomes sight. This is no […]
Gallery: ACMI Exhibition: Thor: Love and Thunder Costumes When Runway emailed me on a cold weekday afternoon in May, I was eating a croissant — not literally of course but spiritually.[^1] I was mid-bite, and being really elegant about it too. As if I’d be anything else? Come on, this is me we’re talking about […]