un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
un Projects

Bryan Spier

Naked and alone: Pat Larter, Laser-Print Painting, 1995

I confess to a prickling of embarrassment when I look at Pat Larter’s Laser-Print Painting of 1995. I first saw it at the opening of the Sarah Scout instalment of Geoff Newton’s epic Like Mike series. Here I found myself embarrassed to gaze too deeply at it, and ashamed to be seen averting my eyes. […]

Helen Johnson

Memory is not a recording device: on Eliza Hutchison’s Hair in the Gate, a biograph

In Australia, we struggle to insist on identity even as we are engulfed by the unrepresentable. I feel that this is a condition of being Australian. The moment we believe we have defeated the unrepresentable is the moment we have once again failed, retreating into construct only to await the next encroachment. Hutchison’s work is […]

Robert Shumoail-Albazi

Zoë Croggon, Pool, West Space, 19 July – 10 August 2013

The contradictory elements of dynamism at play throughout Zoë Croggon’s recent exhibition Pool at West Space, Melbourne, reflect an imitative relationship of both movement and stasis, often through the effective use of visual comparison. Comprising six collage prints fluently combining images of the human body in motion with architectural environments alongside a dance-based video piece, […]

Ian Haig

McCarthyism: Paul McCarthy, WS, The Armory, 19 June – 4 August 2013

The McCarthy era of post-war America in the late 1940s had its eyes firmly set on all things communist, as well as an Orwellian attitude towards subversive behavior. Namesake and bastard child of the era Paul McCarthy however, has his eyes set on all things perverse and fucked up in American culture. His massive exhibition […]

Julian Aubrey Smith

Leanne Hermosilla, Limited Visibility, Beam Contemporary, 8 June – 6 July 2013

Isabelle Sully

Kain Picken, Economy Class/Resort, West Space, 29 August – 14 September 2013

Jarrod Rawlins & Harriet Kate Morgan

Editorial: A short conversation between Jarrod Rawlins and Robert McKenzie

JR : Rob, I want to discuss the concept of anachronism in contemporary art with you. This is the theme we are all working on for the 7.2 issue of un Magazine. You recently mentioned to me that you had been thinking about this subject, about ‘the perpetuation of antiquated styles and the way critical […]

Chelsea Hopper

Georgia Kaw, Patrick Miller & Elizabeth Pulie, Loose Change Menu, Moana Project Space, 19 July – 23 August 2013

Loose Change Menu: an apt title for a rather ill fitting yet satisfying jumbled assortment of artworks. On the whole, it’s a haptic exhibition: giant poster prints of an old couch drape over the walls, literally spilling into the creative studios next door; an unearthed tennis pole from a game of swing ball is lounging […]

Tara McDowell

This monstrous neologism: on Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux

Les Immatériaux roughly translates to ‘the immaterials’ or ‘the non-materials’. These materials are new in that they newly challenge our relationship to the world, whether through the dehumanisation of technology or by the faltering of man’s mastery over nature. And so the exhibition was filled with computers (often malfunctioning) but also artificial skin, Kevlar, and […]

Patrice Sharkey

Channel G, West Space, 21 June – 13 July 2013

In June and July 2013, Sean Peoples staged Channel G at West Space, transforming the gallery’s back space into a temporary, makeshift film studio that broadcast live and unscripted video content produced by an ensemble of local contemporary artists and friends of Peoples. As viewers of Channel G, we were privy to a wide range […]

Michael Ascroft

The controversy over Like Mike

Mike Brown is however not the only artist in Australian history to have been convicted of obscenity. The second, less well known case involved Cath Phillips, a one-time artist, author and publisher, and also organiser at the Sydney Mardi Gras and the Gay Games. Following complaints about her installation Butch Maison: The Palace at Femme, […]

Daniel Withers

Monochrome Exhibition, Sutton Project Space, 22 August – 14 September 2013

Nearly a century after the Russian Supremacists, the contemporary relevance of the monochrome painting is explored in a considered exhibition at Sutton Projects. David Homewood’s curatorial statement speaks of the complications with our traditional process in trying to make sense of a painting when considering the monochrome. Instead of focusing on whether we like the […]

Anusha Kenny

Kim Donaldson, tomorrow a well, VCA Student Gallery, 27–28 February 2013

Kim Donaldson’s PhD confirmation exhibition tomorrow a well formally marked the beginning of her academic research into the concepts of ‘performing the curatorial’ and ‘context-sensitivity’ in exhibition-making.[^1] In reality, Donaldson has been exploring these concepts for most of her career, working as both an artist and a curator to initiate group exhibitions exploring temporality, speculative […]

Isobel Parker Phillip

Clare Milledge, Motivated Reasoning: Strategic, Tactical, Operational, The Commercial Gallery, 22 March – 13 April 2013

Clare Milledge’s recent exhibition at The Commercial in Sydney, Motivated Reasoning: Strategic, Tactical, Operational, consumed and transformed the space of the gallery. Viewers were invited to navigate the calculated arrangement of painted glass, furniture and hanging fabric as a composite and self-contained artistic statement. To make sense of the exhibition, it was necessary to decipher […]

Helen Johnson

Is the research your practice, or is the practice your research?

The question of research in relation to practice is one that every artist undertaking a PhD must struggle with. Below is an attempt to lay out my own understanding of this relationship as I enter the Winter of the final six months of my PhD candidature at Monash University. For if, treating it [fine art] […]

Shena Jamieson

Joshua Petherick, Cusp and Cornice, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 8 February – 24 March 2013

Joshua Petherick’s exhibition Cusp and Cornice at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) brought together two bodies of work, Gutters and Carriers. Both traverse ideas of the everyday, and evoke points of reference within art history such as the Dadaist’s adoration of the arbitrary, the concept of found objects and strategies of chance composition. Petherick […]

Georgina Criddle

Matthew Greaves, MF, West Space, 22 March – 13 April 2013

In some cases, the failure of a work of art can be traced back to inconsistencies between content and form; however, as we see in Matthew Greaves’s exhibition MF at West Space, failing to be coherent in this sense can also be seen as a strategy, if not the actual point. In the exhibition Greaves […]

Shelley McSpedden

Occasional Miracles: Contemporary artists respond to the Shepparton Art Museum ceramics collection, Shepparton Art Museum, 8 February – 30 June 2013

As its title suggests, Occasional Miracles: Contemporary artists respond to the Shepparton Art Museum ceramics collection makes use of a classic curatorial device by inviting six artists to create new works that engage with the museum’s extensive holdings of historic Australian and international ceramics. It seems a foolproof formula. The museum’s collection is enlivened with […]

Timothy McCool

Post-irony

Post-irony: the beginning One day, my roommate, who is not an artist, but is still interested in art, asked me to define my art practice. As I later retold our conversation to some art school friends, I noticed how I kept positioning my roommate as someone who is outside the art world, which simultaneously feels […]

Jarrod Rawlins

Editorial: Mutter, ich bin dumm

I meant to read all about Nietzsche in preparation for this editorial, but I didn’t have the time. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who lost his mind in Turin, a city where I once spent a short, but very enjoyable, amount of time. Apparently, a coach driver was whipping a horse in Piazza Carignano […]

Lauren Bliss

The university in the age of witchcraft

I was invited to deliver a paper on a panel of young researchers, editors and curators at Impresario: Paul Taylor | Art & Text | POPISM, Monash University, 1 September 2012, a forum held in honour of the work of the late Australian art critic Paul Taylor, founder and editor of Art & Text. This […]

Danny Butt

Theses on art and knowledge

‘Knowledge’, as described by educational institutions, is disciplinary knowledge. There is no way to know how much knowledge is held in an object of knowledge (a report, for example) until one has done the work to understand how a field of knowledge is constructed. No report is self-authoring, containing all the knowledge needed to understand […]

Justin Clemens

No creation but through submission

Arts Research? WTF?! Who the hell would consider bringing together such antipodal signifiers unless they were a bureaucrat or a pervert or both? Under what institutional conditions could such a rebarbative oxymoron even make sense? Surely the term freights all sorts of seamy occlusions and destructions? But perhaps my surprise—even shock and horror—at the very […]

Thomas Jeppe

The importance of being earnest while conducting nonsense research as strategic credibility mongering: a defence

Last year I spent a couple of days visiting a friend in Frankfurt. During this visit, I sat in on a class run by Michael Krebber at the local art school. Krebber is an artist known for his ambivalent, ironic and relatively antagonistic position, and his classes are known for being quite loose and free-form. […]

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