As the clock struck midnight, a Witch appeared in the National Gallery of Victoria out of a cloud of dense, black fog. It was 4am. Fumbling with its robes and black pointed hat, a bottle of Flintstone-shaped multivitamins tumbled from a concealed pocket onto the floor and scattered about the space. On all fours, Witch […]
Cartoon meets calligraphy meets word game meets mind map. Such is the mode of Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Free Speaking, which ran at Gertrude Contemporary’s Studio 12 from 17 October to 15 November 2014. Marked with an almost-anachronistic handwritten immediacy, the suite of drawings were made perfunctorily by the artist over a period of one week, in […]
The relationship between society and image-production was explored in The Form That Accommodates The Mess, a program of four films curated by OtherFilm in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Included were Robin Laurie and Margot Nash’s We Aim to Please (1976), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder […]
Since the viral sensation of Bangs with his song and video clip, Take U To Da Movies, a slew of African youth living in Melbourne have taken to rapping as a transformative mode of expression. Ezu, William 2k, Garang Garang, Clik Fablice/Flybz, D KAYZ, Prince Jay and Abiel are some of the names of the […]
The 2013 version of Silver Bullets begins with a re-edited excerpt from Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1967 film I, a Man, in which Solanas performs her own scripted lines. Condensed from the original nine minutes to two minutes, Burchill and McCamley’s re-edit showcases Solanas’s particular brand of table-turning humour, as she wittily refuses a sexual […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘Didn’t the images and forms of modernism already have ruin, decay, and obsolescence written into them?’[^1] — Mark Lewis, Is Modernity our Antiquity? Daria Martin’s One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt is an ambiguous exhibition experience. The chattering of film projectors and the earthy soundtracks by Zeena Parkins resonate through the muddy acoustics […]
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. […]
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 […]
I feel I’m in a beautiful private garden, in the middle of the city. I look up and see all the buildings and the beautiful sculptures. On Tuesdays, when the gallery is closed, it really does become our private space. It’s that sense of privacy in a public environment that I enjoy.[^1] —Isobel Crombie Throughout […]
Much of what I find funny in life emerges from the exhibitions I go to, so when the art’s humourless, I tend to feel a bit deflated. If work doesn’t have an element of humour in it, it’s hard for me to imagine the artist having any fun creating it, thus making it hard for […]
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 […]