When an artist uses new materials, techniques or technologies in their practice, the conventions of experience and analysis are inevitably destablised for the audience. Regardless of whether the innovations are new to human knowledge or simply new to the artist, the shield of expectation – I know what to expect from this painting/from this play/from […]
The broad thematic parameters of labour, sex and the relationship between the two, place the group exhibition ‘Putting Out’ at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in a position to explore how bodies are constituted and governed by sex-gender regimes under the constellation of late global capitalism. In ‘Putting Out’ this wide scope has resulted in an exhibition […]
Artists: Emily Parsons-Lord X Laure Prouvost Sense is something universally experienced and yet so intimately felt it’s often impossible to describe. To touch skin, taste fresh fruit, hear a whisper vibrate in your ear, to see and smell the threatening beauty of billowing smoke is at once familiar and transformative. It is through our perpetually […]
REPLETION; A SUM, 2017; LATE DINING, 2017
Artist: Warraba Weatherall In August I was invited to preview the exhibition InstitutionaLies by Warraba Weatherall at Metro Arts Brisbane. Warraba and acting curator Llewellyn Millhouse walked Brisbane-based Quandamooka curator Freja Carmichael and I through the exhibition. We were both left speechless. I am familiar with Warraba’s work, having followed his mural and street art […]
I met Katherine in 2014 on Facebook and looked up all her work online. Later, I was over at my friend’s house where Katherine was recording Human Pesticide, a noise project with Brennan Olver. She was shouting in an American accent ‘Fuck the world. Set it on fire. Fuck the state and the system. Symphony […]
At the heart of the increasingly gentrified East Brunswick sits the artist-run gallery Punk Café, a name that makes a considered link between punk and the Australian middle class — exemplified by ‘café culture’. Like many of its contemporaries employing the language and aesthetic of punk antiestablishmentarianism, such as Info-Punkt (GE), Punk Café features a […]
The recent exhibitions of Melbourne artists Benjamin Woods, Georgina Criddle and Helen Grogan, consecutively programmed at West Space in 2015, can be seen to crystallise certain tendencies in contemporary local spatial practice.[^1] The current conversation around these projects centres on how they bring to the fore the dynamic but overlooked relations between objects, bodies and […]
In the tradition of OSW, the exhibition was comprised of a range of events, sculptural installations, performances and outdoor works that unravelled over various locations and times and was almost impossible to take in in its entirety. This curatorial approach encouraged recurring visits to the show, hunting for works across the Convent’s grounds and to […]
To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time’… To be con-temporary … can thus be understood as being a comrade of time.[^1] — Boris Groys In his 1925 essay ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Towards a Formulation […]
Mentioned in the same breath as anyone from Christian Marclay to David Shea and Grandmaster Flash, British avant-garde turntablist Philip Jeck has built an oeuvre via the act of pillaging, appropriating and manipulating a record collection that traverses a vast span of music history. But Jeck’s approach to records—and the devices he uses to extract […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]