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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

Gallery: Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery Exhibition: Arthur Jafa, Unrest 7 April – 13 May I am a Wiradjuri guest on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nations. This is where I live, work, and am writing from today. I am paying my respects to Elders both past and […]

Gallery: Connors Connors Exhibition: Then Sharply Turns 13 April – 13 May Then Sharply Turns is one syllable short of the final line of a haiku; the prose subtly suggestive of something that has come before. The title of the third iteration of Conners Conners’ showcase of emerging Melbourne-based artists completes a dubious stanza — […]