Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 20 November 2010 – 15 January 2011 Culturgest, Porto, 5 February – 23 April 2011 If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have never been to Minneapolis nor [sic] Porto so I too have never ‘seen’ the show. — email to the editor, 22 April 2011 ‘Completely honest’, […]

A West Space off-site project, Bogong Alpine Village, Victoria, 19–20 February 2011 organised by Philip Samartzis and Madelynne ‘Site specific’ is a term that, through over- and inappropriate use, tends to become slightly meaningless; much like the term ‘sound art’. Nevertheless, site specificity has come to play a large and ever increasing role within contemporary […]

Like so many insidious and powerful organisations before them, Bababa International (BI) prefer to remain undefined. At present, its six members are nameless and the collective will only agree publicly on their location (Bababa International Airport, Redfern) and their commitment to making and exhibiting art under the BI designation. Perhaps it is this indifference to […]

The Narrows, Melbourne, 30 September – 14 November 2010 Curated by Dominic Hofstede In later covers, Mason moves through a variety of other art movements, such as arte povera, spatial art, colour field painting, geometric abstraction, abstraction, pop art and op art, to name a few. Such referencing kept Epicurean fresh and unhindered by a […]

In the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth claimed that conceptual art would usurp the place of a number of other writing-based practices, such as literature and philosophy. It is now widely known that this bold claim was connected to his idea that the task of contemporary art had become to question and expand the definition of art […]

Y3K, Melbourne, 4–24 December 2010, curated by Kate Briggs Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for The ‘Golden Fleece’ Fourth, no Discovery — Fifth, no Crew — Finally, no Golden Fleece — Jason — sham — too.[^1] Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real followed the threads of the classic stories of […]

Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart 30 October – 21 November 2010 Kit Wise John Vella must be one of Tasmania’s, if not Australia’s, most anarchic contemporary artists. HANGBANG (nightshift) presented Vella’s work to date at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST), Hobart, but was no ordinary mid-career survey show. Vella took his entire artistic output of […]

There was a time in the history of Victoria when the state collections of printed material, visual art and natural history artifacts were housed together under one roof. Of that early grouping only the State Library (SLV) remains in place, the gallery and museum collections relocated to new premises in the 1960s and early 2000s […]

Henri Papin was born on 6th June , third child and second son of his parents, who had between six and eight children. His father was a successful goldsmith, in the rural town of Tours in the Loire Valley in France. He emigrated to Australia in with his family and arrived in Tasmania in . […]

Clock Tower Studio, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth 21 September – 19 December 2010 For three months during his residency at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jacobus Capone created Nine Prayers for Palomar, a series of nine works based on the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s novel Mr Palomar. Calvino’s novel consists of twenty-seven […]

Barbara Kapusta, Desire and What You End up Doing, RMIT Project Space, Melbourne 27 August – 16 September 2010 Dying in Spite of the Miraculous, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 8 October – 6 November 2010 Things I Wish I’d Known, West Space, Melbourne 29 October – 20 November 2010 A work of art produces its own […]

Conventionally a retrospective exhibition is taken as an occasion for the artist to present his [sic] work to date as a reified, ‘logical’ whole, and as an opportunity to demonstrate that he has progressed. That one should be offered such an opportunity at all suggests the achievement of a certain currency in art world chit-chat, […]

Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, Melbourne 10 March – 9 April 2011 curated by Matthew Shannon The spectre of late 1960s art haunts Margaret Seaworthy Gothic — from the exhibition’s title, sourced from the font designed in 1968 by New York artist Lawrence Weiner, to curator Matthew Shannon’s accompanying text, which positions the exhibition in relation […]

Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 22 January 2011 – 19 July 2011 Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson In January 2011 an audacious new public museum was added to Australia’s cultural landscape. Located on a cliff-front in the outskirts of Hobart, the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) houses the private art collection […]

Nicholas Mangan Notes from a Cretaceous World Published by The Narrows in association with Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2010 Hardcover, 88 pages, 115 × 217 mm, edition of 500 I remember lying on scratchy carpet as a kid, watching the Common-wealth Games on TV, and yelling with admiration as Nauru’s single athlete, a chubby teenage weightlifter, […]

It has become apparent that Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) in New South Wales are trying to exist in a climate where both state and local government are publicly pushing to increase the profile of their community and volunteer generated activity. Working in opposition to this, however, is pressure stemming from local government in the form of […]

The Memorial Coordinated by Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson Death Be Kind, Melbourne 29 June – 25 July 2010 In The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard famously imbued the spatial tiers of a building — its cellar, bedrooms or roof — with a series of phenomenological and psychological connotations: the attic with intellectual contemplation […]

Do we sense patterns or impose them? Is it a compulsive human function to make order out of chaos? I have found myself creating a pattern. I’d note a thread of a concept, technique or reference that seemed to connect the works of Sean Bailey, with the installations of Nathan Gray — the colours, the […]

Rounds Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 26 June – 25 August 2010 Rounds is fundamentally based upon dialogues between artists, their artworks and their processes. Conversation is integral to the twenty-nine artworks presented at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). Nine emerging Western Australian artists have been involved in the project, conceived by artist […]

Free Store Kim Paton 38 Ghuznee Street, Wellington 22 May – 6 June 2010 Kim Paton’s Free Store was part of a larger series of projects, run by Letting Space, which proposed to ‘engage a wider public in the vitality and relevance of installation and performance‐based contemporary art practice outside an institutional gallery framework’.[^1] Effectively, […]

Ambianxe Marco Fusinato The Spring Press #9, 2010 The Spring Press, Sydney LP, 180 g, virgin black vinyl Edition of 250 Ambianxe is yet another affirmation of Marco Fusinato’s situation as an artist within the context of the technologised global society. Albeit acting within the marginal economical form of the limited vinyl LP, this embrace […]

Lionel Marchetti and Yoko Higashi Presented as part of Liquid Architecture sound festival 3RRR Performance Space, Melbourne 2 July 2010 The energetic headlining performance of this year’s Liquid Architecture sound festival featured Lionel Marchetti, an Italian born practitioner of musique concrète, and his partner Yoko Higashi, a contemporary Japanese Butoh dancer. With his ad hoc […]

SUPER MARKET As part of Always Moving: A Performance Laboratory in Several Parts Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne Saturday 3 July 2010 In an environment where, despite recent shakiness, capitalism seems as infallible as ever, instances of rebellion like SUPER MARKET can feel tokenistic. But perhaps in this time of reduced public space and emaciated political agency, […]

When Kate Newby scrawled ‘we must build in the open’ in her idiosyncratic script onto the floorboards of Gambia Castle as part of her 2007 exhibition On the benefits of building, I always assumed she was privileging the ‘open’ as that improvisational, and yet urgent domain of self-actualisation. In a culture premeditated on the associative […]