Watching, listening and acting: ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ at Te Tuhi

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We have lost control of the world. How do we know? Look to the weather. According to the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the third, fourth and fifth days in July this year all consecutively broke records as Earth’s hottest day since scientists began recording in 1979. Where I was in Aotearoa/New Zealand, it was the coldest day of the year so far, and the rain was coming sideways, blown in from heavy grey clouds.

Of course, it was the ultimate hubris to believe that humanity had control of Earth’s environment at any place or point in time. With the scale and urgency of climate change as a global challenge, museums, galleries and cultural organisations have recognised the crucial role they can play in shaping and supporting, and I would add leading, society’s response to the crisis. The first museum dedicated to climate change was established in 2015, New York’s Climate Museum, and other initiatives include international collaborations such as the Museums and Climate Change Network, Museums for Future, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art’s Toolkit on Sustainability in the Museum Practice and the activations of Climate Museum UK.

Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland’s Te Tuhi contemporary art space is part of the distributed association called the World Weather Network, promoted as a constellation of 28 ‘weather stations’ set up by arts agencies around the globe as an invitation to look, listen, learn and act in response to the climate emergency. This grouping of artists, writers, organisations and associations are also denoted as ‘reporters’, observing, documenting and reflecting imaginatively and objectively on climate. 

Te Tuhi’s recent exhibition ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ engaged with the context of overwhelming and unstoppable climate effects. Curated by Janine Randerson as a specialist researcher and artist working in the field, ‘Huarere’ was posited as an attempt to free exhibition-making from a human-centric perspective, prompting curiosity: Is it possible to overcome the subjectivities of curatorial and institutional purpose and artistic participation to achieve human critical distance, let alone aim for pure presence itself? Does it account for the subjectivity of the viewer? Such an aim was a thought-provoking contribution to the challenges that are part of a call to action for a sustainable future. 

FORECAST (2023) by Julieanna Preston, Layne Waerea and Mick Douglas on Te Tuhi’s outdoor physical and digital billboards signalled the project on approach to the building. Described as ‘a collaborative, durational performance writing work’, it is the outcome of engagement with Word Weathers, a 24-hour online performance last year for more than 55 writers. The static billboard display of three matrices of words, letters and punctuation created a puzzle that provoked interest.

Visitors might also have noticed aeolian harps on the roof by Phil Dadson and James McCarthy, titled respectively Nga-hau-e-wha and Tamanui. The sounds from these instruments haptically brought the weather into the gallery. Inside, Dadson’s compilation of mobile phone videos, Koea O Tawhirimatea – Weather Choir: Voicing the Wind (also 2023), created with content by Breath of Weather Collective, also immersed the viewer in nearly 20 minutes of wind-song. The work has been collected from eight collaborators around the Great Ocean of Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa who placed one of Dadson’s DIY aeolian harps on their respective island. Recorded between the 2022 and 2023 solstices, the sounds of escalating winds and views of sea-pounded shorelines are memorable among the ambience arising from changing weather.

Before Koea O Tawhirimatea, viewers first encountered Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s Sun Gate: Ha‘amonga a Maui (2023). Using footage from Andrew Kennedy and ‘Uhila’s body cam (with James Tapsell-Kururangi, Josh Savieti and Nonga Tutu acknowledged as technical crew), Sun Gate was recorded on the autumn equinox, 21 March 2023, just over a year after the eruption of undersea volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai in the Tongan archipelago. In Sun Gate, the artist sits by the thirteenth-century limestone-coral trilithon Ha‘amonga a Maui in eastern Tonga, unmoving through sun, rain and cloud for over ten hours, creating a digital connectivity across the atmosphere of Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa. The viewer can only observe ‘Uhila’s endurance, a similar sensation felt in Te Tuhi’s courtyard with the reprisal of Weather Stations (2009) by Paul Cullen (1949–2017). Accompanied by three watercolour drawings from the related series, Weather Stations had been reconfigured by artists J. A. Kennedy and Ammon Ngakuru (a former studio assistant). Hoses, pipes and glass vitrines sat atop steel frames on the work’s original concrete pavers, suggesting stalled attempts to assemble rain gauges. At Te Tuhi, the courtyard’s soil had also been laid bare, the living ground on which Cullen’s industrial relics sat as a symbol of redundant or misconceived hope.  

It was a new work commissioned from Maureen Lander (Ngapuhi, Te Hikutu, Pakeha) that centred the visitor on entry, grounding the exhibition through knowledge. Made from harakeke, muka and laser-cut ‘foam’ suspended at eye height, Wave Skirt (2023) drew the viewer in, surprised by the unexpected acrylic sparkles among the strands. An adjacent installation by Lander with video projection by Denise Batchelor and sound by Stìobhan Lothian, where the moving image of lapping waves on sand was projected onto dried flaxen strips, brought an additional affective complexity to the imminence of harakeke. For the artists, Ngaru Paewhenua (2023) references whakapapa and the sea that bought Ngapuhi ancestors to Hokianga, ‘their migrating waka assisted on the journey by three great waves: Ngaru nui, Ngaru roa and Ngaru Paewhenua’. Their work recalls the third wave that brought the waka ashore, as well as the myriad effects of climate change on today’s oceans and the resulting impacts of rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms.

The conceptual heart of the exhibition was MAKU, te ha o Haupapa: Moisture, the breath of Haupapa (2023), a collaboration between Ron Bull (voice), Stefan Marks (programming), Janine Randerson (video), Rachel Shearer (sound), glaciologist and adviser Heather Purdie, with a live data stream courtesy the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. At an immersive scale, this video confronts the viewer with Haupapa (Tasman Glacier). This has been the longest glacier in Aotearoa, flowing down from the eastern side of Aoraki (Mount Cook). Purdie’s long-term research has revealed that the glacier is melting from within crevasses that retain the sun’s heat; and that there are submerged ice ramps in the lake at the end of Haupapa which cause large icebergs to split off that accelerate glacier recession.

This was the work that most tested the idea of curation or artmaking removed from a human-centric perspective. The artists state that they ‘relinquish the ordering and qualities of sound and video to the weather conditions of Aoraki’, recorded by the instruments placed near Haupapa. Video and sound were recorded by Randerson and Shearer in summer and winter 2022, along with atmospheric field and hydrophone recordings from 30 metres deep in the lake. Subsequently, Marks’s interventions ‘subtly alter the brightness, direction, and movement of the images and sounds according to the real-time weather conditions, and wind direction’. In addition, live recordings of Bull’s voice taken at the lake are woven through in acknowledgement of Kai Tahu matauraka (words and names of the elemental ancestors).

As I understand, the image and sound of MAKU vary according to the sun’s radiation and wind directions: the weather. The noise of cracking infers the movement and melting of the glacier into the lake, which is growing at such a rate that the glacier is expected to disappear within 20 years. Randerson and her collaborators bring us face-to-face with the glacier with all the microbiological contents and ancient breaths encapsulated in the ice over tens of thousands of years, which appear in hues of winter greys and summer blues. While digital manipulation evidences intervention in the creation of MAKU, the spirit of human embeddedness and respect is a meaningful part of its layered visual and ambient qualities.

‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ came at a crucial time in our critical understanding of how we can look to be stewards of the future, including embracing racial and other forms of justice that are coincident with causes of climate change. Rather than be a witness of weather, the exhibition subtly prompted viewers to reflect on their own inseparable interconnectivity with weather worlds and hence its incorporation in subjectivity. Where viewers take this experience will only be evident in the future.

Dr Zara Stanhope, Ringatohu/Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, Ngamotu/New Plymouth 

Curated by Janine Randerson, ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ was on display at Te Tuhi, Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland, from 4 June until 30 July 2023.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Vale: Jim Allen MNZM, 1922 – 2023

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Described by critic Wystan Curnow as Aotearoa/New Zealand’s ‘first contemporary artist’ and as ‘the local precedent for present day art practices’, Jim Allen is also renowned on both sides of the Tasman as a radical and transformative art educator, first as head of sculpture at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland from 1960 to 1976, and then as founding head of art at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) from 1977 to 1987. Allen, who died in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland on 9 June 2023 aged 100, uniquely connected the tasks, responsibilities and creative possibilities associated with his multiple roles within an all-encompassing commitment to art as a form of dialogue in the employ of collective social and cultural advancement.

Following active service in the Second World War, Allen studied sculpture in Otautahi/Christchurch and then at the Royal College of Art, London. He taught in rural schools in the far north of Aotearoa through the 1950s, an experience critical to his growing conception of education as a process grounded in reciprocal relationships of exploration and exchange. By the end of the 1960s, and following a long sabbatical trip to Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States in 1968, which brought him into direct contact with new conceptual and performative practices as well as radical social movements and protest actions, Allen began to transform Elam’s sculpture department into a process-driven creative and intellectual environment. Learning was centred around experimentation and discussion. The cultural and environmental site-specificity of practice was highlighted. Performance, ephemeral installation, instructional work, sound and moving image all featured heavily in what rapidly became the heart of a new post-object art in Aotearoa, or simply the ‘new art’ described in the book of this title edited by Allen and Curnow in 1976.

Allen connected these developments with worlds outside the art school, setting up public presentations for artists at gallery and non-gallery locations alike, including within major events such as the Mildura Sculpture Triennial. This practical encouragement of the work of artist peers and a concern for building sustainable practical and critical support structures for experimental practice carried over to Allen’s subsequent work in the development of SCA (a decade-long commitment that he later described as an art project in itself); his critical role in the foundation of Artspace in Sydney in the early 1980s; and, following his retirement from SCA, in a major report he prepared on career opportunities and strategies for artists in Australia.

Allen’s own work evolved from a relatively traditional object-based practice of the 1950s and 1960s encompassing work in metal, wood, plaster, concrete, ceramics and stained glass, including major public commissions such as the Futuna Chapel altarpiece and windows (1961) and the Hocken Library mural (1967), to more process-focused experimental work following his 1968 sabbatical. Significant installation works such as the ‘Small Worlds’ project (1969), New Zealand Environment No. 5 (1969), Arena (1970), the two-part O-AR (1975), and the three-part performance work Contact (1974) all acted as participatory experiments in sensory experience, perception and cognition, investigating relations between bodies, materials and technology. These experiments were extended in a set of performance works Allen made in 1976 while on residency at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, including Poetry for Chainsaws, Newspaper Piece and On Planting a Native.

Allen eventually returned to live in Tamaki Makaurau in the late 1990s, continuing to make work across media through to the end of his life. He exhibited regularly with Michael Lett and, in addition to new work, remade and presented many of his installation and performance works from the particularly critical period of 1969 to 1976 across various exhibitions in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, Ngamotu/New Plymouth and Tamaki Makaurau, as well as in Australia and Europe. All this activity ran parallel with the interest of new generations of artists, curators and art historians in Allen’s work, along with the 1970s moment of post-object practice in Aotearoa more broadly, evidenced most recently in ‘Groundswell: Avant-Garde Auckland 1971–79’ (2018–19) at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki curated by Natasha Conland. In 2014 Clouds and Michael Lett published a book of interviews with Allen undertaken by artist Phil Dadson and art historian Tony Green, Jim Allen: The Skin of Years.

Allen’s legacy is not to be found in work long since deposited in any archive, but in work itself remade and regenerated by both the artist and others over recent decades. It is to be found in a practice that continued an explorative and socially informed trajectory until the end; in an evident influence on artists of subsequent generations seeking precedents for contemporary attitudes and practices; and in the forms of and spaces for art he helped create on both sides of the Tasman.

Blair French

Retooling the conventions of value: An Indigenous perspective at the Museum of Sydney

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At the far eastern corner of the ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’, a seductive shimmer of silver glints out from a darkened black-box space. Esme Timbery’s shellworked opera house is a wonder to behold in any context. But here, floating atop a bay of tinsel sparkling under a bright spotlight, it is breathtaking. According to curator Tess Allas (Wiradjuri), the idea for this presentation is one that has percolated over the three decades she has been working closely with the Bidjigal artist. It is a dream manifested and, to my mind, speaks to a much bigger world-building dream – one that not only contests First Nations genocide, but imagines a world in which such contestation no longer requires repetition.

Timbery’s work, commissioned by the Sydney Opera House in 2002 and borrowed by the Museums of History NSW for this exhibition, is flanked by four posters of shows presented at the opera house from the State Archives of New South Wales. The most salient of these features a black screen-printed portrait of Truganini, accompanied by a title in bright red capitals, ‘THE LAST TASMANIAN’, and a subtitle in black, ‘A STORY OF GENOCIDE’. The poster is shocking and demands closer inspection, in which a clever retooling of the object is revealed. To spite its problematic message, the poster was chosen by Allas to illustrate an unbroken, ante-colonial and cross-continental practice of shellwork carried through countless generations of Aboriginal women. Below her arresting gaze, Truganini’s neck is adorned with an abundance of strung shells. The creation of shell necklaces is continued by contemporary shell workers, such as Lola Greeno, who prove the ongoing and thriving presence of palawa women and their cultural practices. Timbery’s shellwork was also passed through generations of Bidjigal women as both a way to continue cultural knowledge and as a means of gaining economic independence. The dialogue created between Truganini’s necklace and Timbery’s opera house, as such, contests the historic and ongoing efforts of genocide, which include the mythologisation of Truganini as ‘the last Tasmanian’ and gives testament to how First Nations cultures survive and thrive through creative practice grounded in Country and informed by savvy contemporary sensibilities.

This dialogue continues in the exhibition’s adjacent room. On a bed of shell grit sits a striking woven rendering of the opera house featuring predominantly undyed cotton woven over the sails, and hand-harvested, dyed and woven Lomandra longifolia grass for the base. The work was made by master weavers Steven Russell, Timbery’s son (Bidjigal/Dharawal/Wadi Wadi), and his partner Phyllis Stewart (Yuin/Dharawal), and commissioned for the exhibition. Within the conversation of contesting genocide through cultural practice created through the adjacent room, the woven opera house both nods to and demonstrates the radical work institutions can do in supporting the continuation of such Indigenous practices. This support continues to shift the representation of First Nations cultural practices through contesting conventional exhibitionary traditions and retooling or developing new models. As such, Allas’s commissioning and curation remind us that, without the critical intervention of First Nations curators, museums would still be denigrating Indigenous cultural production as craft, kitsch or, at worst, ethnographic specimen.

The conversation I raise here is old news for those familiar with discourses on exhibitionary models. But the relevance of repetition is clearly demonstrated by the rest of ‘The People’s House’, which presents material in an aesthetic firmly seated in anthropological, archaeological and ethnographic styles. In its first room, for example, a Mei mask from the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea is presented within a clear perspex box typical of conventional museological displays. The aesthetic is not self-reflexive, as we might expect in a post-1990s new institutionalism cultural climate, but earnest. It is this earnestness that worries me. Not only because it is a litmus test for the institution’s relationship with contemporary cultural practices, but also because it indicates the persistence of an ideology harking back to the museum’s history as the site of the first Government House. Museological models that prioritise the display of Indigenous cultural objects as specimens casually reproduce an aestheticisation of genocide. This is not hyperbole. It is for this reason that the use of contemporary art exhibitionary aesthetics by Indigenous curators, especially in traditional museum spaces, is so important. The retooling of the conventions of value developed after the dematerialisation of art, to reinsert and assert value for Indigenous culture, is nothing short of revolutionary.  

Given the reported intent to render the Museum of Sydney a First Nations space, I anticipate a difficult conversation ahead as to the ways in which the exhibitionary models of the institution speak to its strategic goals. The interventions of the shellworked and woven opera houses, however, give me tentative hope and I look forward to seeing such curatorial interventions expanded.

Aneshka Mora, Warrang/Sydney

Co-presented by the Sydney Opera House, ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’ is on display at the Museum of Sydney until 12 November 2023.  

Imagined encounters: Haegue Yang at the NGA

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‘Changing From From To From’ celebrates the National Gallery of Australia’s ongoing commitment to gender equality, through the presentation of an intimate yet intellectually and visually impressive body of work by renowned South Korean contemporary artist Haegue Yang. Based in Seoul and Berlin, Yang’s borderless approach to her practice traverses geographic regions, artistic genres and historical and cultural contexts resulting in a fluid and ever-evolving output.

Curated by Russell Storer, Head Curator of International Art, and Beatrice Thompson, Associate Curator of Asian and Pacific Art, the exhibition comprises four key works, two of which have recently been acquired for the collection. Mobile sculptures, digital wallpaper and a sound piece – all rich in material contrasts – present different modes of Yang’s practice. The title of the exhibition is sourced from a poem by the late conceptual artist Li Yuan-chia and captures Yang’s ongoing exploration of transformation, migration and abstraction – both as a language and means of open-ended interpretation. At the media preview in late May, Yang further elaborated during a conversation with me. She referred to concepts of ‘movement and vibration’ and acknowledged the starting point of the exhibition was ‘the changing nature of water as a central motif’.  

Mobility and transmuting forms, histories and memory, and the permeability of these concepts, have long been an interest in Yang’s meticulous research and practice. Large-scale sculptures and installations often comprise disparate materials from industrially manufactured objects such as venetian blinds or steel frames juxtaposed with handcrafted techniques of knitting or weaving, to straw, sound or scent and, recently, artificial intelligence. Objects are often intended to be moveable or enacted with choreographed invigilation; the tension of a sculpture moving through space takes on a performative human quality.

The installation Sonic Intermediates – Three Differential Equations (2020) individually represents sculptural portraits of three pioneering modern artists. Here, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Li Yuan-chia are shamans acting as intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. These anthropomorphic sculptures – steel-framed intricate objects made of mesh, bells, plastic twine resembling fur, and zip ties – jingle and vibrate when playfully activated by invigilators. Yang described these works as ‘historical creations … honouring not yet happening, imagined encounters’. Yang’s exploration of migration, energy (nature and people) and rituals come to life when these passive sculptures become active.

Developed using sophisticated artificial intelligence, Genuine Cloning (2020) comprises two interwoven sound elements – a replica of Yang’s voice whispering a pre-written script and a partial recording of the 2018 DMZ Summit when then-president Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held a private conversation. Amusingly, this historic interaction was subdued by the sounds of ambient birdsong in the nearby nature areas. The audio permeates the exhibition space and spans topics including language, weather systems, the naming conventions of typhoons, and observations on life and ethics. In conversation, Yang observed that the voice, when listened to closely, is ‘cynical, cold, not human’ in its construction.

Continuing Yang’s fascination with natural phenomena and extreme changes of weather, Non-Linear and Non-Periodic Dynamics (2020), an immersive wallpaper that wraps the exhibition space, uses technology to layer imagery and motifs. Inspired by Edward Lorenz’s mathematical modelling of chaotic weather patterns, the work was made in consultation with Ngambri Elder Paul Girrawah House to incorporate local motifs including the kurrajong tree, bogong moths and the nearby lakes George and Burley Griffin. Acknowledging her position as an outsider, since her first visit to the Australian desert in 2017, accompanying artistic director Mami Kataoka on a research trip for the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Yang’s desire to connect to place and deepen her understanding of Indigenous culture and Country is authentic and stems from her rigorous approach to research. Visually dynamic and energetic in its shifting and enveloping quality, the wallpaper belies the flatness of its digital origins and wall-based installation. Intentionally, the audience is just as swept up in the movement, or vibration of the piece, as the chaos theory represented within the work.

Each installation is as considered as the artist herself. In conversation, Yang speaks eloquently on topics including climate change and the formation of cyclones, migration, future projects and previous visits to Australia. Yang is part of a generation of groundbreaking contemporary artists from South Korea. Research-based and often esoteric concepts could result in an alienating output, however this is simply not the case for Yang. Mesmerising in their detail, complexity and structure, the work and conversation remain with you long after.

Sarah Hetherington, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Russell Storer and Beatrice Thompson, ‘Haegue Yang: Changing From From To From’ is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 24 September 2023.

A revealing darkness: ‘Shadow Spirit’ at Flinders Street Station

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Rarely do I walk into an exhibition and find that I am instantly awed. Or, that I put my phone away and just experience the show. But in the case of Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton’s ‘Shadow Spirit’, I am, and I do. 

‘Shadow Spirit’ is presented as part of the RISING festival in Naarm/Melbourne and is housed in the dilapidated top floor of Flinders Street Station. It is an immersive exhibition of 15 new commissions – a major selection being time-based art – by 30 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists who explore Ancestral knowledges and Indigenous epistemologies. Unknown and unseen to all but the First Peoples of so-called Australia, these Indigenous spirits of memories, and indeed spirits of Country, have been generously brought together by Moulton and the exhibiting artists to teach non-Indigenous audiences the multiple realms of Indigenous comprehension which cannot be defined.

As a Ngiyampaa person, it is not lost on me how, despite the settler-colonial power dynamics at play inside the old Federation-era building-cum-art space, Moulton has shaped the exhibition into a space of Indigeneity, rather than just for Indigeneity. For non-initiated non-Indigenous audiences, what I am speaking about is how Moulton’s curatorial decision to position artists of material, spiritual and intellectual Indigenous knowledges into clusters is a purposeful act to counter the settler-colonial architectural features of specific exhibition zones. Within this Indigenous sovereign display space, the arched windows and pressed tin (or otherwise moulded) ceiling panels lose their power. Artworks rise from darkness to embody that energy, where they encourage the unfolding of truths.  

There is an implied route for audiences to take when they emerge from the lift. First is left, where the artworks are a little more in conversation with each other and where the rooms are more open and connected. It would be remiss of me not to mention the ambitious projection by Brian Robinson (Kala Lagaw Ya/Wuthathi) in this area, Zugubal: The Winds and Tides set the Pace. The work is in a room by itself and bleeds from the walls onto the floor and ceiling. It is an enveloping display that heavily draws on Robinson’s linocut prints, including the one shown in the opposite room, and gives particular emphasis to his technical skill as a printmaker. The animation sees Zugubal, or celestial beings, begin life and move through the space, dictating life on earth. They navigate and shape cultural practice under the watchful eye of Tagai, a star constellation which moves across the ceiling.

Nearby is Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens’s Deeply Rooted, an incredibly moving comment on the destruction of Country, our trees, and an Indigenous ecology that has been connected to place since time immemorial. The upturned roots that form major parts of this series of works were sourced by Dickens following the destructive Lismore floods of 2022. Joining Dickens in this area is a sculpture by Vicki Couzens (Keerray Wooroong/Gunditjmara) and paintings by John Prince Siddon (Walmajarri), and tucked away in a separate room, watershadow, an installation of various media by Judy Watson (Waanyi). Combined, these are the few exceptions to the time-based artworks that unfold throughout the rest of the exhibition.

Within the right wing of the show, the first work viewers encounter is The Umbra by Hayley Millar Baker (Gunditjmara/Djabwurrung). The sound of heavy rain drew me into Millar Baker’s display, but it was the tender and slow pacing of the noir film that had me seated quickly. The film explores witching hour, when the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is at its thinnest. There is a beautiful scene where The Umbra’s protagonist sits by the fireplace, mostly still, and in near silence. Opposite her is an empty armchair, but that is not really correct: an unknowing spirit sits alongside the protagonist, also warming herself by the fire. This is the second film from Millar Baker, following the success of her previous work Nyctinasty (2021), which continues to champion ideas of female magic and spirituality. As a young filmmaker, I am invested in seeing her practice continue and, with time, broaden.

While much of the exhibition releases haunting or sometimes distressing truths, there are elements of playfulness which reveal themselves through this section of the show. Moving along the hallway one encounters Way of the Ngangkari (2015) by Warwick Thornton (Kaytej), which likens the practice of ngangkari (healers) and their spiritual connections to Country to the school of force-wielding Jedis who originated in the movie franchise Star Wars. Nearby, Tiger Yaltangki (Pitjantjatjara) and Jeremy Whiskey (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara) present ROCK N ROLL, an installation of Yaltangki’s painted guitars mounted as a framing device around the pair’s joint video work. Further down the corridor is a new animation by Dylan Mooney (Yuwi/Meriam and Australian South Sea Islander) that brings to life his digital drawings of plants, spirits and a young Aboriginal man. It is a welcome reprieve to encounter after the high-energy projection by Yaltangki and Whiskey. This is an astute decision on the part of Moulton, as curatorially she gives the viewer time to prepare for the introspection needed to encounter the final work in the ballroom. 

Rarrirarri could arguably be considered the magnum opus of The Mulka Project with Mulkun Wirrpanda and of the exhibition itself. The work features a large termite mound sculpted from fibreglass in the centre of the room, with projections of Wirrpanda’s artworks that serve to document all the plants and insects from Yolngu Country, while exploring the cyclical nature of unseen ecologies. It is an exceptional installation, paired with a soundtrack of song and storytelling which reveals to an uninitiated and non-Indigenous audience that something spiritual and intellectual is happening. The work is both about sharing the unknowable and the championing of a Yolngu epistemology. It becomes a reflection on an Indigenous world of living where culture always comes first and where the unseen is sacred.

I believe ‘Shadow Spirit’ to be the most comprehensive showing of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art that Naarm has seen in the last five years. It has so much to bring to light, with all the artists doing special and important work in speaking to the in-between and how this informs, shapes and changes the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people see the world. In such a divisive year of politics, non-Indigenous viewers can learn perspective through visiting the exhibition, to understand Indigenous knowledges and histories that they do not know or have not attempted yet to realise.

Erin Vink, Naarm/Melbourne

Curated by Kimberley Moulton and presented by Metro Trains Melbourne for this year’s RISING festival, ‘Shadow Spirit’ is being exhibited on Level 3 of Flinders Street Station until 30 July 2023.

Filling a cup in a river / working in the open: Lachlan Thompson in conversation with Stolon Press’s Tom Melick and Simryn Gill

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Started on Gadigal and Wangal land in 2019, Stolon Press was conceived by Tom Melick and Simryn Gill as: ‘a way to publish texts and images that might easily fall through cracks or remain in boxes and bottom drawers ... Like the plants from which it takes its name, Stolon Press works close to the ground, opportunistic in modest terrain and untended places.’ The following conversation took place over a period of two weeks or so this year. We initially arranged to meet in person, but ultimately decided that written correspondence would be best. The text has been passed back and forth, circulated, mulled over, written across weekends, during commutes and between deadlines. 

Lachlan Thompson (LT): In thinking about publishing, I often find myself circling back to ideas around culture. When you write, make books, pamphlets and/or photocopies, is there a specific image/definition of culture that you have in mind? 

Tom Melick (TM): Defining culture isn’t something we specifically think about when we’re making books, but you’re right to link the production of images and text (publishing) with the question of ‘culture’ more broadly. I’d say we try to get close to the word’s early usage, ‘to tend and cultivate’. Simryn likes to say we grow books, and I like that as an image and a method, because it implies an ecosystem. We work closely with the people we publish so the books come about through proximity, intimacy and persistence. An important aspect for us is that who we publish may not necessarily think of themselves as writers or artists, or perhaps do not even think what they do is publishable. But this isn’t charitable labour. We work with people we want to work with and want to read. So much of it is about what can come from conversation, and a book – even if it’s two pages stapled together, or one page folded in half – can be an excellent way to talk about something, to clarify, to organise, to combine, to compare, to record, to recover, to translate, to hold and then, eventually, to share. This places distribution – or a better word may be circulation? – at the very heart of publishing.

Since the 1990s, Arjun Appadurai has encouraged approaching culture not as a noun but as an adjective. As a noun, ‘culture is some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical’, whereas its adjectival use turns it into a heuristic device, ‘a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference’. Publishers come in all shapes and sizes, and their motivations and aims are usually calibrated to certain authorships and readerships. Often, say in academic publishing today, those doing the writing and the reading are restricted by the professionalisation of language or by financial models, such as paywalls. The consequence of this is that academic discourse becomes less and less accessible; it partitions and divides between those who do research and writing and those who do not; those who study and those who are studied; those who operate within institutions and those who don’t. In other words, it loses its heuristics. Although we are still working this out, we want our books to travel and to find writers and readers who we couldn’t even imagine. Although the books we make are very simple, often photocopied and stapled, they are all carefully worked out in the making, and, ideally, they would travel like seeds, sprouting and growing in places we could never predict.

LT: Do you think there is a distinction constructed between conditions of production and content, and does a specific structure, type of content, aesthetics or poetics (maybe even politics) emerge from your publishing approach?

Simryn Gill (SG): The ‘content’ of what we do is held as much in the method of working – ‘conditions of production’ if you like – as in the address and subject matter of our publications. For us they’re impossible to separate.  

Tom has described our approach to publishing. Think of it as a praxis. In our way of working, without planning to do this, praxis is a kind of reverse engineering – of theory; of ‘what is our politics’; of ‘how to be political’. We’re not so much putting some principles into practice, as figuring out our methodology through our activities. For us, being political in our time lies in thinking about how we live, thinking about what we do, the choices we make. Tom and I are drawn to working with people in an ecosystem (as our friend Khaled Sabsabi said of us) of friendships, connections and collaborations; tapping and sharing – pooling/pulling – skill, passion and our time. Inevitably this approach requires patience, flexibility, compromise, opportunism, slowness. We work slowly, at our pace and our authors’ and makers’ paces. We look for ways to fund our books, case by case, often choosing modesty as a solution to cost, but also because we learn a lot from putting the books together ourselves. As I’ve said, and it’s worth repeating: we learn from doing. Heuristics + Praxis. The books come out of this: are they by-products, manifestos, guidebooks? A way (for us) to live/make a living?

What I’m describing are high ideals. To work in the open, and openly, but still serious and generous to our authors and collaborators, our readers and ourselves. We often fall short, get frustrated, get things wrong; we are well aware that we are working from our own limitations (from our foibles, opinions, desires, egos). We also publish our own materials at Stolon Press. We make the frame, it also frames our own works – writings and images.

So what does this say about our ‘conditions of production’ and ‘content’? Messy and tangled, but also, we hope, clearly visible in their continuity and mutual dependence.

LT: I like the possible description of your books as by-products, something marginal, coming out of a larger or centralised process. Do you think that the book, as either an object or form, is capable of holding these conversations, friendships and ecosystems that grow/make them?

TM: A book can never hold the entirety of its process, or the conversations that go into its making. It’s a small part that you come away with, like filling a cup in a river. We often choose to work with people on multiple books, because it allows us to engage with different aspects of what they do over time, hopefully opening up new areas for them and for us. Form speaks directly to the experience of reading. We think a lot about the ‘objectness’ of a book (size, extent, paper, font, font size, margin size, cover and so on), but we’re not interested in fetishising print. Publishing can be an anxious business, and looking at the design of many books today this anxiousness creates a form that is both cautious and overdressed.

How do you trust a reader to find a book? To pick it up and be held by what’s inside? What books are capable of taking the full weight of our curiosity?

LT: At university, I remember being told that books can be thought of as a kind of architecture. Are there ways that you try to expand the ecosystems and structures that make up and surround books?

TM: I like the idea of thinking about a book’s conceptual and physical structure, and how the two can merge, so that the concept is experienced in the reading of the book rather than left as an abstraction. A book often brings with it a host of heterogeneous and contradictory parts, some of which are made visible through the process of making while others stay hidden ‘behind’ the face of the text like the cogs in a clock. There is no right way to go about it.  

Simryn and I have chosen to place ourselves in the middle of these entanglements. We don’t have one method or process for bringing a book to print, common in trade and academic publishing. How can we translate a literal stolon collected from Botany Bay into a book (Coasting)? How can we combine text with images already painted and printed by an artist, such as William Eric Brown, into a story (A Sentence for the Sun, also 2022)? We approach the making of a book as a live event; we have to think on our feet and figure out how all the parts come together.

There are other models I admire, like the books my friend Elisa Taber shows me from her part of the world – from Cartonera Publishing. The books are bound together from recycled cardboard bought from cartoneros (‘garbage pickers’) and then handpainted. The books are sold at the cost of production, and they can be ‘ordered’ by readers like a pizza.           

So perhaps we can think of books as different kinds of architecture? Some are houses, shelters, sheds, tents, skyscrapers, ruins. There are books with big wide hallways and others with narrow passages. Some books open interior spaces we’ve been in before, are familiar to us, while others surprise us.

Stolon Press’s most recent publications include Lee Weng Choy’s Hours, Accidental and Arbitrary: A Year of Writing Lonely, Aveek Sen’s Picture Book and Xenia Cherkaev’s St. Xenia and the Gleaners of Leningrad (all 2023); for more information, see Stolon Press.

A spectrum of disgust, celebrated: Juan Davila at Foxy Production

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An alien in the colonial outpost, Juan Davila has sewn seeds of discontent via a discombobulating process of abject humour and history painting for five decades. A small selection of these works are on view at Foxy Production in Manhattan as part of Davila’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

The Santiago-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based painter is an idiosyncratic elder of critique. I like to think of his belated United States debut as one that coincides with the fading superpower’s festering empire, because Davila is a connoisseur of nation-bashing. Nation-bashing comes in many forms, one of which is creating the conditions that stimulate the slipperiness of interpretation, where confusion is a guiding force, freed of the colonial imagination by indecipherability.

There have been past attempts to censor Davila’s work, most notably from the Hayward Gallery in London in 1994 and the 4th Biennale of Sydney in 1982. If censorship is based on a culture’s fear of its own interpretation, how do these images, rooted in the subconscious and the poetic traversing of time, land outside the settler-state?

Davila straddles numerous modalities, from subtle gestures to blunt caricatures, in which humour can be seen as a call to consciousness, such as in Crocodile Dundee (1988). Is there anything as uncomfortably fun than a gay man depicting two of Australia’s most treasured heterosexual men engaging in sodomy at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Elsewhere on the same plane of Crocodile Dundee is a naked Queen Elizabeth II, the original Bankcard logo, a pissing boy with a condom dangling from his mouth, a cartoon of a few cavorting crocodiles, and a small Parliament House in Canberra with a bent flagpole bearing the Union Jack. Placing Parliament House beside the Bankcard logo is one way of conflating the nation-state with big business (1988 was Australia’s Bicentenary). There is also a tiny clump of fingernail clippings and hairs, adhered with dollops of thick oil paint. To attempt to decode the symbols, appropriated moments, disorganised gender and sexuality and allusions to repression and oppression, is to submit to the burden of history. There is no escape, only voice and tone where viewers can open themselves to the vagueness of textures of discontent. A spectrum of disgust, celebrated.

Somewhere between 1988 and 2003 Davila shifted from bombastic compositions of ridicule to whimsical depictions of figures in the Australian landscape that cradled critique via references to art history. Davila is said to have disagreed with modernism impeding on figurative painting as a tool for political stimulation, and subsequently worked to rectify that interruption. Meandering through styles is a way of resisting the singular cohesion of modernism. This intention feels almost quaint amid the deluge of AI and the gentrification of our imagination.

Two women on the banks of the Yarra (2003) is a direct response to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), reversing the gaze of the viewer over a pair of female figures and driven by a lack of reverence towards the way women have been depicted throughout art history. Perplexing is the insertion of two found portraits, collaged onto the painting, and sitting above the women. One is of an Indigenous man and the other is of a white man in smart casual attire holding a book. The women look upwards, towards the sky, and the men return the gaze of the viewer. While the title of the painting only refers to the two women, and the Yarra which is abstracted in the background, the inclusion of the male portraits reinforces references to nineteenth-century female objectification and the othering of Indigenous Australians through primitivism.

Naarm/Melbourne’s Yarra was once renowned as the world’s muddiest river. Since European settlement, land clearing and development have meant that a layer of silt is permanently suspended on its surface. So, to emulate nature’s response to duress is to muddy the waters. Much of the pleasure of such work is leaked through contradiction: the abstraction that surrounds the figures, who of course benefit from a kind of ocular supremacy, is as important as any centre of interest. The painterly brush marks at the edges of the canvas are an analogy for what exists at the borders of comprehension, in the often-misinterpreted edge lands of the Australian landscape.

One of the most recent paintings, Untitled (2022), is much more economical. The diptych consists of a cubed figure with coronavirus-shaped genitalia stepping in an abstract yellowed landscape, next to a naked transmasculine person suspended in a lime-green background, staring blankly at the viewer, their withholding and simplicity bewitching.

To interpret Davila is to walk into the prison of one’s own conditioning, wading through the murky areas of subjective subconscious and the wild zones of the colonial imagination. His work resembles a directive but would never dare to tell us what to think. Instead, it socialises us with the anxieties, celebrations and shame of each era, stitching together elements of populism and the fringe, testing their compatibility. To wander through different times, styles and ideas is a way to avoid the singular narratives of nationhood or modernism. These works transcend their original indictments through their emphasis on the magic and the friction that occurs when someone punctures the horizon line, muddying the waters.

George Egerton-Warburton, New York City 

Co-presented by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, ‘Juan Davila’ is on display at Foxy Production in New York City until 25 June 2023.

Grace Culley’s ‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ at West Space

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Day to day we operate within the unspoken norms of society: don’t stare, be quiet on public transport, look both ways, smile back. We endeavour not to rock the boat, but when we do we spiral, replaying situations over and over in our minds.

Mistakes = regret. Regret = sadness. Sadness = a loss of dopamine.

As humans we try to avoid this loss by taking on a dopamine-centric worldview, chasing validation and approval at every turn. How, then, are members of the neurodiverse community – whose experience of dopamine, desire and control differ – expected to assimilate? Grace Culley’s exhibition ‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ unpacks this concept and how it collides with the expected societal notions of acceptable behaviour.

Tucked away on Level 1 of Collingwood Yards, West Space is unexpectedly lofty. As you enter the gallery a thin structure comes into view, its rough black body leaning against the wall. Titled The Gate, the carbon fibre and steel sculptural assemblage takes a moment to grasp, its exaggerated Gothic font creating an anamorphic illusion. ‘Heavn’ it reads, the gate to heaven.

An ambient guitar track loops in the background, circulating from the two large speakers in the corner of the room. Its easy mellow tune rubs against the industrial materials of Culley’s sculptures, imbuing a sense of poetic duality. In many ways this exhibition pays homage to the aesthetics of Naarm/Melbourne’s inner north. Padlocks, steel, newspaper and resin adorn Golden Brown and you know you love me (both 2023), visually referencing the area’s architectural landmarks and ubiquitous iron fencing in an expressly rough style that invokes niche Melbourne sentimentality.

In Fallen from Grace (2023), these aesthetics are laid bare through the tenacious repetition of ballpoint pen on paper. The artist kneels at the centre of the drawing, her hands pressing against her thighs and her back arched. She is facing away from the viewer, her long hair tossed over her shoulders, adorned in a cropped sweater and tight thong. It resembles the type of softcore pornography we might see on Instagram. However, the enraptured face of a demon disrupts this fantasy, its eyes fluttered back in ecstasy, an engorged tongue rolling down the lower back. This disturbance is not a mere commentary on women’s bodies or the oversexualisation of the female form. Rather, as informed by Culley’s experience of Tourette’s syndrome, this drawing acts as a self-portrait merging feelings associated with the loss of control with the societal judgments surrounding the condition. It focuses on the way in which these judgments have proliferated in online spaces and how the artist, as a young woman, responds.

‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ explores Tourette’s syndrome both conceptually and physically. The audience can feel the laborious repetition of the artist’s hand, identifying the many loops, hatches, scrunches, mouldings and welding that occurred to produce them. The exhibition catalogue includes a conversation between Culley and West Space Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones, in which the artist addresses why repetition is so integral to this exhibition, stating: ‘Sometimes it’s nice to repeat things that are causing me physical strain and stress but aren’t tics.’  

Alongside the artist’s own circumstances, the exhibition draws from the extensive body of preparatory research conducted by Culley concerning others living with dopamine imbalances. Beautiful and haunting, the exhibition asks its audience to reflect on their experience of dopamine, how they chase it, wield it and judge others who differ.

Lily Beamish, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ by Grace Culley is being exhibited at West Space in Naarm/Melbourne until 29 April 2023.

Linear invention: Nonggirrnga Marawili and Leo Loomans at the Drill Hall

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This unusual exhibition brings together the work of two artists, previously unknown to each other, whose media and materials, cultural heritage and artistic formation are vastly different. Yolngu painter Nonggirrnga Marawili is a revered Elder of the Madarrpa people in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, and underwent a long apprenticeship in painting, traditionally a male preserve in Yolngu culture, as part of a distinguished family of artists. Sculptor Leo Loomans, New Zealand-born, of Dutch heritage, educated in Warrang/Sydney and based in Kamberri/Canberra, works at the intersection of two distinct sculptural traditions: a process in which found fragments of machinery are cut, twisted and welded together in improvised assemblages; and the tradition of ‘drawing in space’ pioneered by Spanish sculptor Julio González, in works produced in collaboration with Picasso around 1930.

Putting these disparate works side-by-side, as curator Terence Maloon has acknowledged, carries risks. Not only the risk of insensitivity in juxtaposing Indigenous and settler cultures, but the risk of consigning their works, as Maloon writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘to an illusory, false friendship, or to two solitudes’. But what speaks across these spaces, as the title ‘FLUENT’ suggests (it also references the landmark exhibition of contemporary Indigenous women artists in the Australian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale), is a quality of linear invention. This perception arose from the happy accident of their works being pictured on facing pages in the catalogue of a 2019 Drill Hall exhibition of the Geoffrey Hassall and Virginia Milson collection. Both artists are extensively represented in that collection, so this exhibition was a way of further teasing out and exploring this chance revelation of a mysterious affinity.

Marawili’s paintings frequently involve large circular or rectangular masses connected and crisscrossed by strings of dots, or ribbons of parallel lines suggesting, in a loosely pictorial way, rivulets of rainwater, or jags of lightning, the stippling of sand along a shoreline, or the movement of woven fish traps in water. Marawili has said that her works are conceived for ‘outsiders’, that she paints only subjects that interest her, that are devoid of the sacred. Yirrkala tradition stipulates that sacred stories can only be told using material that comes from the land; for male painters, charged with passing down lore, this has meant strictly replicating clan designs painted in ochre on bark. As a woman, Marawili is under less strict cultural obligations; not only is she freer to improvise with design and subject matter, she has been granted permission by Elders to supplement natural pigments with ink from discarded toner cartridges from the local print workshop, while the wooden boards she paints on were originally brought to Yirrkala to be laid over the basketball court for dances. Marawili’s works thus fluently combine both natural and artificial materials ‘from the land’, combining veiled acknowledgements of sacred designs with pictorial elements such as cloud patterns reflected in water, or the movement of water against rocks.

Loomans’s work with found metal similarly pays respect to its origins, while shifting functional forms towards becoming aesthetic or design elements. For instance, the teeth of interlocking cogs are elsewhere figured in an improvisatory register as a formal design of parallel ribs or grooves, articulating a push-and-pull between the restrictive precision of engineering and the freer aesthetic of line and gesture. Indeed, for an artist working in the apparently rigid medium of steel, Loomans is known for revisiting and revising his sculptures, returning to them again and again to shift and realign, add and cut away, a drawing in space that includes erasures and palimpsests. Compositionally, the sculptures often enact this tension between given and improvised, with the base sections more obviously collages of heterogenous found elements, sutured with visible welds, while the upper sections are looser and more linear, metal traceries that lift the mechanical components into rhythmic suspensions, or enclose and enfold shaped and articulated voids. This open structure of loops and struts and anchor points uses empty space and the light that passes through it as one of its materials.

This is an exhibition that responds to the viewer’s movements through the gallery: just as Marawili’s compositions subtly shift their balance when seen from different angles, their masses and lines releasing different energies of movement and stillness, Loomans’s sculptures not only dramatically change shape when viewed from different angles, but take on from close-up sculptural qualities of weight and tactility, and from a distance the lightness of drawing and mark-making.

What resonates between these works is the power of invention in the tracing of a line. Even as each artist works respectfully within the constraints of given materials and inherited traditions, their works convey a profoundly spiritual experience of both discipline and freedom.

Russell Smith, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Terence Maloon, ‘FLUENT: Nonggirrnga Marawili and Leo Loomans’ is on display at the Drill Hall Gallery, Kamberri/Canberra, until 16 April 2023.

Algorithmic shifts: ‘Data Relations’ at ACCA

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Having recently played at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), ‘Data Relations’ was an innovative, international and often introspective look at how technology’s collection of information transforms our relationships within and between cultures. The media theorist Alexander R. Galloway, quoted by artist Zach Blas in his three-channel video on the troll as a figure of enchantment and entrapment, writes that data from its Latin root means ‘the things having been given’, and this exhibition showed that the ways in which we relate to data as individuals and cultures can, like a Trojan Horse, be a dubious gift.

The exhibition began by drawing lines from the past to the present. These lines, drawn by New York-based Nigerian artist and researcher Mimi Onuoha, set a tone of insightful inquest about how social bias and power dynamics are perpetuated by contemporary technological systems and networks. Her video These networks in our skin (2021) depicts four women braiding technological cables; in The cloth in the cable (2022), these braided cables were installed alongside custom-designed fabrics and spices by Naarm/Melbourne-based African homewares entrepreneur Dinzi Amobi-Sanderson. The works evoke the fact that the cables which power our split-second searches span along the same routes which powered the slave trade. This piece of critical context highlights Onuoha’s notion of ‘algorithmic violence’ and the way in which automated decision-making systems prevent human beings from exercising agency by anticipating, blocking and sometimes even meeting their needs.

It was a timely motif that ran through an exhibition that sought to ask how we understand the phenomena of these evolving, enframing and perhaps entrapping technologies. A work like the multi-channel sound installation After words (2022) by international collective Machine Listening emphasises not only that the internet is always listening and learning from human beings, but also how automated systems are actively trained to speak our language through sound recordings performed by actors.

It is a question that has relevance across languages and cultures, and this is also clear in Winnie Soon’s investigation into free expression and censorship, Unerasable characters I–III (2020–22), a software installation which shows how Chinese surveillance technologies censor social media in a series of artefacts that progress from the book to the screen. These pieces are based on Weiboscope, a website from the University of Hong Kong that monitors posts on the Chinese-language social-media website Weibo, both for their content and for the duration of time they exist online before they are erased. Soon’s trilogy emphasises the way data relates to political agency, and the way the transient pleasures of online engagement can lead to an overall erosion of our freedoms. It is a subtle and provocative exploration.  

The political scope of the exhibition extended to the inaugural commission on ACCA’s new ‘Digital Wing’ platform: Offset 2023: Alternate carbon credit registry by New York-based artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne. The website proactively intervenes in the carbon economy by allowing activists to calculate the carbon offsets from direct action, emphasising how the political burden of intervening to stop climate change has been displaced onto the individual. Brain and Lavigne’s works are as playful as they are elegant, and the website is still accessible.

An intimate and arresting coda to the exhibition was provided by Lauren Lee McCarthy’s performance piece Surrogate (2022– ), an ongoing conceptual work where the Los Angeles-based artist allows prospective parents to control all aspects of a potential surrogacy using existing apps that raise questions about technology and agency at this most fundamental human level.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

Guest-curated by Miriam Kelly (with coordinating curator Shelley McSpedden), ‘Data Relations’ was exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 10 December 2022 – 19 March 2023.

Tell me you’ll come: ‘THE PARTY’ at UNSW Galleries

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Queer nightlife in Sydney stands at a critical juncture. The relaxing of lockout laws have temporally coalesced with a COVID-era appreciation for leisure and togetherness. We’ve had more than enough time with certain apps and the city seems once again desirous of bodies-meeting-in-space. This moment presents itself with an opportunity, then, to revere our wonderful history, to take stock of all that has come before. To energise and organise for the city we deserve.  

‘THE PARTY’ arrives like Bianca Jagger on a white horse. A collaborative exhibition between José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries and Curator of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and Nick Henderson, Curator and Volunteer Collection Manager of the Australian Queer Archives, ‘THE PARTY’ explores Sydney’s queer party ecologies between 1973 and 2002, presenting a dizzying array of handmade ephemera including posters, flyers, tickets, photographs, videos, wearables and more.

The objects on display skilfully shift the focus away from luminary designers like Ron Muncaster and Peter Tully, giving space for a great many others to be honoured and remembered. Crucially, the exhibition brings attention to the revellers themselves and evidences the intensely collaborative and grassroots spirit of those decades. 

The exhibition leads us through a chronology of sorts, beginning with a series of posters for early gay liberation club gatherings from the late 1970s: ‘Hot ’n Sloppy / Blatant Outrage’ reads one; ‘Tell Me You’ll Come?’ another. The biggest space is dedicated to the biggest parties, including the 1980s Mardi Gras, Sleaze Ball, RAT (Recreational Arts Team) Parties and Sweatbox. There are hand-drawn set designs for the Hordern Pavilion events, the tease of a Stephen Allkins cassette-tape set list for the Dome, and fashions by Martin Harsono, Kathy McKinnon, Mark O’Brien and Billy Yip.  

A room designated ‘Dyke Decadence’ showcases lesbian nights, including the radical 1990s women’s takeover of a men’s bathhouse: ‘On the Wet Side’ at Ken’s at Kensington. A screen-printed poster by Anne Sheridan paraphrases the Emma Goldman catchcry: ‘IF I CAN’T DANCE … I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION.’ Nearby, Peter Schouten’s posters for Homo Eclectus showcase their masterful approach to graphic design.

The deepest enclave of the exhibition echoes a darkroom and holds objects of a kinkier nature. There are exquisite scenes captured by Jamie James from Hellfire, Club Kooky, Sex and Subculture and more, alongside posters and photos from long-running leather party Inquisition – events that feel a world away from the saccharine palatability of the parties of ‘Sydney WorldPride 2023’.

Times have changed. Producers here struggle. Artists struggle. We can’t ‘go back’ and nor should we. We deserve something new, something beautiful, and to dance with the ghosts of history as practical, ethical and spiritual foundations for what comes next. And when sex workers organise a queer strip club in an abandoned cinema, when femmes and dolls snap up every ticket to ‘Xaddy’s Boat Party’, when fetish folk gather at the Hide, when a dive bar acquires a new sex-on-premises licence, when the Bearded Tit gets butch on ‘Sad Dyke Sundays’, when Loose Ends heaves, when Arq reopens, and when House of Mince ‘minces’ – it feels like what’s next is already upon us.

Blake Lawrence, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by José Da Silva and Nick Henderson, ‘THE PARTY’ is presented by UNSW Galleries and ‘Sydney WorldPride 2023’ and is being exhibited at UNSW Galleries in Warrang/Sydney until 23 April 2023.

The 7th Singapore Biennale: In search of Natasha

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‘Who is Natasha? What is Natasha? Where is Natasha? Am I Natasha?’ I found myself asking as I explored the conceptually enigmatic and modestly scaled 7th Singapore Biennale. Commissioned by the National Arts Council and organised by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), the biennale aims to reflect the diversity of contemporary art practices from a Southeast Asian perspective. The current edition, embracing multiple viewpoints, has been curated by four Co-Artistic Directors – Binna Choi (South Korea), Nida Ghouse (India), June Yap (Singapore) and Ala Younis (Jordan) – and named, rather than titled, ‘Natasha’.

By choosing to reflect on the meaning and relevance of a biennale in a world experiencing the global pandemic’s aftermath, the Singapore Biennale turns itself inwards, bringing increased awareness to interiority, intimacy and systems of being. Spanning 13 venues including nearby islands, the commercial centre, an historic industrial port, a shophouse, libraries, hoardings and a Ferris wheel, the biennale comprises over 100 works by more than 50 artists and collaborators.

Most projects are exhibited at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, SAM’s temporary venue while renovations are underway at the original museum. Highlights here include: Norwegian artist Elina Waage Mikalsen’s Áhcagastá – Tales of the Ember (2022), which explores fire and its cultural uses through an installation of Sámi weaving and sound elements; Shan artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s The Opium Parallax and Footnotes (both 2019) that feature a series of 23 thoughtfully rendered intimate paintings narrating the domestication of the opium poppy and its effects; and Raed Ibrahim’s Scripted Tablets (2022), a series of 45 engraved terracotta sculptures that retell history in a range of permutations according to their linear arrangement through the Jordanian artist’s creation of a visual code, and in a medium which is materially vulnerable.

South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s newly commissioned work, The Hybrid Intermediates – Flourishing Electrophorus Duo (2022), is one of the few installations that quietly dazzles. The two life-size sculptures of electrical outlets as bodies housed in positive and negative forms ­topped with colourful plastic vegetable gardens are made from densely woven rattan and plastic twine; they captivate (and intermittently activate) as they explore notions of hybridity and mobility. Elsewhere, projects such as Trevor Yeung’s Pavilion of Regret (2022), a makeshift greenhouse where visitors can exchange plants, and Heman Chong and Renée Staal’s The Library of Unread Books (2016– ), a temporary public reference library where people can read or donate books, help to further deepen the community engagement and participatory aspects prevalent in this biennale, whereby small gestures or acts on a personal level can impact the greater whole.

Held at a time when Singapore is seeking to emerge as a new centre for art in the region, the artists in ‘Natasha’ have staged works that are rich in culture, ideas, place, history and politics. While intimate in scale, it is a biennale that looms large as it questions how we see ourselves and each other in this complex and nuanced world. ‘Natasha’ is therefore a journey, both of the art and of oneself – an elusive being, a place, a moment in time, nature, community or simply a non-existent but amusing figment of the curators’ imaginations.  

Sarah Hetherington, Singapore

The 7th Singapore Biennale, ‘Natasha’ opened in October last year, and is installed across 13 venues until 19 March 2023.

A private evening: Hilarie Mais’s ‘Night Simile’ at Downs & Ross

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The most striking aspect of Hilarie Mais’s gridded arrangements of wood, screws and oil paint, is that they are constructed freehand at night. I enjoyed hearing about this from curator Conor O’Shea shortly before Mais’s exhibition opened at Downs & Ross in Manhattan. O’Shea spoke of the speed with which Mais works and the way she employs the ‘memory palace’ technique, where one visualises familiar spaces to recall information.

For Mais, personal and subjective imagery is used to power the transmission of form into grids. The modularity of Mais’s work raises a paradox of universal inconsistency. A close inspection reveals the minutiae of everyday life in little nurtured glitches.

Memory and the past can be a grim place and it makes me consider the show’s ‘black and blue’ colour scheme as an adjective. If the askew grids are bruises on white walls, or minor traumas to put in order, they are also recesses where healing takes place. Their finish is a not-quite claggy satin paint that thickens in corners and at edges.

Small brushstrokes are visible, somewhere between crosshatching and feathering. They give the impression of dappled light, or eyes half-shut. Up close, the screw heads pulse: ‘X’ and ‘+’ and ‘-’ and ‘|’. The forms have a relationship to all those cubed and gridded works of the canon, and to constructivism, but their quaintness and odd veneer is what makes them feel present, and also by way of their relationship to a simultaneous show across town at Matthew Marks Gallery, where Vincent Fecteau painted one small sculpture, that had the presence of a scrambled miniature warship, to look like tiramisu.

I’m not sure whether anyone has written about Mais’s works being funny or kitsch before, it’s a fine thing to be! It occurs at the intersection of their seriousness and the crafty vernacular of their finish. The way they hang and lean in the space, and the attention they hold, appears more a result of the emotional weight they are imbued with, than how they look. Perhaps there are jokes in the transmission? Every grid is an elegy to daylight and straight lines. Chambers for the night or cages where light is a convict.

Though it isn’t visible in the exhibition documentation, Mais’s work casts a matrix of shadows, as if from an urge to cultivate the environment they stem from, their own private evening.

George Egerton-Warburton, New York City

Curated by Conor O’Shea, ‘Night Simile’ by Hilarie Mais was exhibited at Downs & Ross in New York from 9 December 2022 to 28 January 2023. Hilarie Mais and Conor O’Shea are also collectively showing their work in the exhibition ‘Linear Systems’ at Sutton Projects, Naarm/Melbourne, 4–25 February 2023.

Memory traces: Jacqueline Rose’s ‘Enigmagnetic’

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Jacqueline Rose’s recent series of drawings made for a subtle and beautiful viewing experience that responded to and set off the light-filled main room of the relatively new Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf in Warrang/Sydney. Continuing but also innovating on her long-held concerns with the possibilities of the abstract line, these works riff like improvised music or choreography, but are very much grounded in the physicality of their materials and processes.

Rose begins with neutral-coloured handmade papers, which she overlays with washes, brushstrokes or pencil, crayon and ink marks, open to how each medium yields or resists. This then becomes the substrate for collage, often comprising of coloured paper strips, a material that lends itself to playful improvisation while maintaining the sharp rigorous lines distinctive to the artist’s practice. The works’ apparent formal simplicity comes from a multitude of creative decisions that balance colour, line and texture, a layering that sometimes resembles stitching. Alive to rhythm and pause, the process manifests in subtly pulsating images whose energy flows through circuits, grids and cycles.

Scale also plays a part: Rose’s drawings are not large and were installed in such a way as to create the possibility for a more intimate exchange, gently angled on a long table at hand level as if inviting touch. They keyed into the memory traces still embedded in this unique space from its many years as a local library – one the artist remembers from her childhood – while the works’ soft organic palette dialogued with the glints of blue and green entering through the harbour-facing windows.

With a well-honed balance between meticulous mark-making and openness to process-driven change, Rose produces works conducive as much to meandering thoughts as to meditative stillness. Each drawing is a self-contained composition with its own rhythms and phrasings, but together they connected to keep the movement, of memory and sensation, open.

Jacqueline Millner, Warrang/Sydney

‘Jacqueline Rose: Enigmagnetic’ was displayed at the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf from 30 November 2022 until 8 January 2023.

‘The Return’: An intimately scaled encounter

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The gallery day01. is in the front room of a bald-face terrace in Warrang/Sydney’s Darlinghurst. There is an immediacy to this typical inner-city style of house: with no buffer zone between interior and street, the contrasts and coherences between the two are heightened. Staff from the adjacent cafe hand-deliver cups of tea to gallerist Eloise Hastings and her guests in this pristine tiny space on a busy intersection. The cultural precinct in which day01. is situated also includes the National Art School and numerous commercial galleries such as COMA, Liverpool Street Gallery, Robin Gibson Gallery and KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT (the latter being another example of art being showcased in a small domestic-scale space).

‘Te Hokinga (Te Reo Maori), Malaku Pitjangu (Pitjantjatjara), The Return’ is an exhibition of paintings by New Zealand artist Raukura Turei (Ngaitai ki Tamaki [Tainui], Nga Rauru Kitahi) in conversation with the ceramic work of the late Kunmanara (Pepai) Jangala Carroll (Luritja/Pintupi). ‘The Return’ is characteristic of day01.’s programming. Since its inception earlier this year, the gallery has presented intimately scaled exhibitions that bring together the work of local and international artists in unexpected encounters. Rather than representing a roster of artists, its program is built on curatorship and collaboration.

While Turei has seen her profile steadily growing in her home country for several years now, her work is relatively new to Australian audiences. ‘The Return’ includes a selection of small- and medium-scaled canvases, which, through materials and process, refer to experiences of grief in the artist’s life. The creation of these works starts with the artist’s body, with traced details forming the basis for an abstract composition built from organic materials. Turei applies layers of blue clay collected from her ancestral lands of Ngai Tai ki Tamaki, and black iron sand from Auckland’s west coast, which then are dug into with oil stick forming fingerprint-like marks. The resulting swirls of ochre, pale blue-grey and shimmering black conjure the contents of a Petrie dish, clusters of crustations and galaxies of stars.

Anchoring Turei’s paintings, on a low plinth in the centre of the gallery, is a ceramic work by Kunmanara Carroll (1950–2021). The bust-like white ochre form of Walungurru (2019) is tracked across and around with inky black, suggesting both a path across his father’s Country near Walungurru/Kintore in the Northern Territory, and Carroll’s own personal journey which involved a range of community leadership roles in Eagle Bore, near Pukatja/Ernabella, prior to turning to artmaking. Together, the works of Turei and Carroll create a restrained, delicate and surprising harmony which calls up the vital, magnetic yet enigmatic relationship between people and place.

Chloé Wolifson, Warrang/Sydney

‘Te Hokinga (Te Reo Maori), Malaku Pitjangu (Pitjantjatjara), The Return’ is being exhibited at day01. in Warrang/Sydney until 17 December 2022.

Saucepans and data: Justene Williams’s ‘Victory over the Sun’

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In 1913, the premiere of Victory over the Sun resulted in a riot due to its absurdity. The Russian futurist anti-opera’s libretto was written by Aleksei Kruchyonykh in an invented untranslatable Zaum language, with experimental music by Mikhail Matyushin, and bold set and costume design from Kazimir Malevich where he first debuted his seminal Black Square painting design. Despite its initial negative reception, Victory over the Sun is attributed to revolutionising the Russian avant-garde and has seen several restages over the past century. 

The performance centres around a group of futurists who seize the sun and navigate the conflicts and consequences following its capture. Its most recent adaptation saw a re-imagination by the Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist Justene Williams, commissioned for the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016. This 2022 version, co-presented with Sydney Chamber Opera and the Australian National University Chamber Choir, with production by the Street Theatre, was performed recently at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) for the gallery’s fortieth anniversary. 

Describing her modern iteration as ‘baroque grunge’ with an ‘arte povera aesthetic’, Williams transformed the NGA’s Gandel Hall into an unrecognisable dark space filled with colourful square collages. The floor-length installation made from felt, plastic sheets and sunshades draped over the walls and windows, blocking out all natural light. Neon pink and blue spotlights lit up the room in all directions, creating a playful atmosphere that welcomed the audience. A bright orange acrylic cube hung from the centre of the ceiling above a black box. It represented the sun, suspended in midair, waiting to be seized, defeated and locked away in Malevich’s signature square. 

The material experimentation was most visible in the elaborate costumes which expanded from Malevich’s original designs to incorporate objects such as saucepans attached to a headdress and chimes sewn to sleeves, serving as percussion. The voluminous and vibrant outfits were showcased with the performers’ exaggerated movements throughout the hour-long performance.

The elaborate choreography was highlighted by the open stage design that allowed for the costumes to be viewed at every angle from the stretch of three-tiered benches facing each other – a set-up mirroring a fashion runway, creating an immediate engagement with the audience.  

The nonsensical libretto and a video montage were projected onto the walls. Mixed with wordplay, references to Kruchyonykh, data, time travel and contemporary machines (such as a coffee maker), the amusing non-linear verses were consistently met with laughter. In a similarly unpredictable manner, the footage ranged from Aztec temples to blood cells, and from rocket launches to superimposed geometrical shapes making nods to the suprematism movement. Small vintage TVs placed around the space broadcast the live musicians playing experimental compositions from an ensemble of the theremin, keyboard, flute and strings. 

The numerous moving components in the undefined stage were visually overwhelming at times, evocative of the saturated ways in which digital content is increasingly consumed in shorter intervals. In this way, the restaging of the 2016 iteration of Victory over the Sun felt extremely timely as its chaotic nature encapsulates current anxiety-inducing discussions about the future.

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Kamberri/Canberra

Produced as part of the National Gallery of Australia’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, Justene Williams’s Victory over the Sun was performed in the gallery’s Gandel Hall, Kamberri/Canberra, on 14 and 15 October 2022. 

Patriarchal heroism and ‘The Picasso Century’

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Everything about this exhibition is heroic: the large number of works on display, including about 80 by Picasso and over 100 by his friends and acquaintances; the extensive and thorough research; the highly informative 84-page website and the 441-page complete and very heavy catalogue. It takes hours to see the exhibition carefully and almost as much time to navigate the website. The catalogue is so vast that it could have been the work of an eighteenth-century German philosopher. Like Picasso, the exhibition is larger than life and twice as dominating. And yet we are long past the time when serious questions have been asked about the very nature of this sense of heroism, especially with the re-evaluation of the image of Picasso as a bourgeois patriarchal hero – the epitome of an aesthetic and singularly masculine productivity. Patriarchal heroes are no longer tenable and this exhibition demonstrates why, although this is probably not the intention of the show.  

Since ‘The Picasso Century’ opened in June, perhaps armies of amateur artists have been inspired to produce large numbers of analytic cubist paintings in their garden-shed studios, especially as the warmer months arrive. Maybe this is the exhibition’s intention: to contain the aesthetic imagination within the heroic ideas of Picasso, to once more enthuse entire populations with the myth of the creative genius standing alone at the apex of culture and to whom the rest of us must pay obeisance by copying him. The works on show make Picasso’s ideas accessible.  

Yet, in this exhibition, the cracks are there in a number of ways. The fragile nature of the image of patriarchal heroism is now very clear to those of us looking. These flaws are not in the well-known, often-recounted and prodigious sexual exploits of the great Picasso. They are, rather, in the way that his problems with gender remained the basis for his practice for his entire life, and that these problems emerged from a number of effects from his early life to his old age. The romanticised yet rigid ways of thinking about gender identity inherited from nineteenth-century bourgeois European society remained undeterred and also developed throughout his life, like the small child whose appetites become more complex as they age and who still retains the same inner foundation. 

For Picasso, gender is war and the exhibition is a celebration of Picasso’s battles with both his own masculinity and with the feminine as if they were victories. Yet there is also an abiding sense of melancholy and loss in his work. It is as if his constant search for new ways of making art leaves him with the feeling of unfulfillment for what he has abandoned. This, of course, includes the friends with whom his art appears. All too often some friend or acquaintance is shown taking one of his ideas and developing it far beyond what he achieved, leaving him searching desperately for a new idea to keep his practice ahead, original and profitable.  

The Picasso century is, of course, the twentieth century. For the twenty-first century, it has a slightly mournful nostalgia that no doubt appeals to the general public, and the abundant educational materials offer a great deal in this regard. University theorists will be as satisfied as the Sunday painters. This is definitely one of the great exhibitions to have appeared in a public institution in Australia, though for a show of this importance, it is odd that the plinths often used to separate the public from the works are sometimes so heavily lit that the glare makes looking difficult. 

Still, it should not be forgotten that the exhibition is historical and, like all history, is written from the point of view of those who still dominate the battles for power in global western culture. History is constantly being challenged and rewritten; Picasso is no exception. However, the heroic times of modernist painting are, for the foreseeable future, over or at least should be. By showing how the supposed heroism is actually built from a fragmented series of personal relationships and disasters, the tragedy of war, famine and other upheavals, simply reinforces the need to find a better way, a better art.  

Tom Loveday, Naarm/Melbourne 

Curated by Didier Ottinger, and developed for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) by the Centre Pompidou and the Musée national Picasso-Paris, ‘The Picasso Century’ continues at the NGV International in Naarm/Melbourne until 9 October 2022. 

An intimate togetherness: Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin’s ‘Paeonia Drive’

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Early this month, the eleventh-floor rehearsal room at the newly opened Taipei Performing Arts Centre was adorned with a fixed sunset. A neon-orange vinyl curtain hung in the pink dance studio, in front of undulating windows reaching from floor to ceiling – obscuring an already obscured view, and basking the space in a generous warm light. This was the backdrop for Paeonia Drive, a newly staged performance by Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin, showcasing their four-year-long, ongoing collaborative research project.

In this 2022 iteration, the 60-minute performance was framed by an installation of objects and devices that sought to reflect, simulate, broadcast, fracture and even manipulate: movable partition panels were transformed into mirrors, diagonally lined along the right wall; cameras were set up in all corners and a monitor streamed their views; two screens played a video of the artists’ 3D-scanned self-portraits, and an iPhone camera was synced to another TV to cast its observations. These set-ups fragmented the space while expanding it all at once, creating an uncanny closed-circuit environment of multitudes with inescapable reflections – all who arrived at Paeonia Drive belonged to it, becoming part of the work.

‘The relationship between seeing and being seen, of object and subject, changes [in the performance],’ says Su, a Taiwanese Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. ‘The presence of cameras shifts [these] conditions,’ she adds, suggesting the piece’s panopticon-like experience.

Goh and Su moved vigilantly with the props, using them in their elegantly captivating choreography to constantly alter the spatial arrangement as they navigated a surrounding mobile audience. Without any seating or a defined stage, the mobility of viewers created an unpredictable dynamic that required both participant and performer to continually adjust their positions to one another.

Goh, an Australian Warrang/Sydney-based dancer and choreographer explains: ‘People have time to situate themselves [within] the space, and [their movements] are activated throughout the performance … They exist inside the work by interaction and by their own exploration of [their] image.’ 

Surveillance and digital anxiety are topics that Paeonia Drive speculates on, revealed through the metaphor of a garden that is also hinted at by its title: while the role of the gardener entails care and maintenance, the act of gardening involves patterning, containing and control. The artists, both donned in large hats and sunglasses, spoke to this during a scene where they read the subtitles of a slightly sinister computer-animated video piece, proclaiming a ‘gardener’s vision of war’ and the ‘slippery nature of abstraction’.

However, despite the ominous narration and theme – or because of the imposed frameworks in the physical space – the tender moments when Goh and Su touched and moved in unison, witnessed and made room for by the audience, revealed an intimate togetherness. In the context of a rehearsal studio, the performance was ultimately about that, as Goh reflects: ‘Providing a space to question how we behave is also to rehearse [the] possibilities and processes of being together.’

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei 

Research for Paeonia Drive began in 2018, as part of Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM), an initiative curated by River Lin and launched by the Taipei Performing Arts Centre (TPAC). The project is co-produced by Arts House (Naarm/Melbourne) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (Warrang/Sydney), premiering as part of ‘BLEED 2022’, a biennial event organised by the two Australian organisations along with TPAC and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Launched in late August this year, ‘BLEED 2022’ continues across the three cities until 25 September, with online and in-person programs.

This is the place: Luke Brennan’s ‘Pangs’ at Al Fresco

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There is something magical about being inside the ruins of the Yale-Columbia Refractor. The late winter sun seems to shine a little more subtly, illuminating the peeling wall paint across the heavy crumbling concrete structure. It feels mere years short of dystopian.

‘I was on Mount Stromlo for work a few years back and I ended up here,’ Director of Al Fresco, Oscar Capezio, remembers. ‘I saw this space, and I thought: “This is the place.” ’

And those words – this is the place – capture the premise of Al Fresco, as an experimental outdoor fine arts project. Capezio has a talent for placemaking, and Al Fresco is no different: ‘Without boundaries, beyond financial imperatives, open and exposed to the elements’, it forces audiences to interact with art in a completely fresh way.

Al Fresco’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Pangs’, is a solo presentation by Warrang/Sydney-based painter Luke Brennan. Brennan’s work draws on the organic and the biomorphic, using materials such as soft wax with acrylic paint to disrupt the preconceptions of art historical authority. Capezio describes the word ‘pang’ as: ‘Anxiety arriving at speed – sharply felt but unexpected.’ Brennan’s exhibition can be understood as a manifesto of degradation; of place, mind and body.

First, there is the degradation of place: striking and quintessential. It is within the deteriorating concrete walls of the Yale-Columbia Refractor that Al Fresco takes place. In 2003, the 26-inch refracting telescope fell victim to Kamberri/Canberra’s vicious bushfires, with the battered shell of the dome providing a stark reminder of the catastrophe. The setting’s sense of dark spectacle allows for the erosive and corporeal nature of Brennan’s work to be realised in its truest form.

The pangs that drive Brennan’s practice also signify a degradation of the mind. Brennan is relieved that his works are out of his studio and on display. The four large canvases included in ‘Pangs’ are the largest works the artist has produced, and according to the exhibition text, have haunted him for the past 12 months like an affliction.

The accumulated surfaces of Brennan’s paintings evoke those of a decaying body. Organic forms reminiscent of tumours and scars protrude from the surface of the canvas, periodically stretched and unstretched by Brennan. This process causes his thickly applied layers of wax and paint to bend, flake and crack. Repeated cycles of creation and reduction obliterate any trace of the artist, and all evidence of process, and yet they produce an intimate stripped-down exposé of the artist’s psyche.

Brennan’s work is poetic in a way that it shouldn’t be. The artist challenges taught systems of artmaking, yet the final result is something so complex and violent that it also seems somehow mechanical and calculated.

Brennan has created this body of work specifically for his exhibition at Al Fresco; the canvases both stand out and fit in with their dilapidated environment. Every piece of the puzzle fits seamlessly into a narrative of disrupting institutional authority. Gone are the hierarchies that position audiences to stare blankly at coloured surfaces confined to a white cube. Al Fresco is a space in which audience, artwork, artist and exhibition are experienced simultaneously.

This – in all its naked, painfully beautiful yet abject glory – is the place.

Zeta Xu, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Oscar Capezio, ‘Pangs’ was exhibited as part of Al Fresco’s inaugural winter program for two weekends in August 2022. Al Fresco’s forthcoming spring 2022 exhibition presents a collection of artworks that look towards the heavens, to consider what is ‘out-there’.

Tonal dissonance and painting local: ‘Light + Shade’ at the Art Gallery of Ballarat

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The Art Gallery of Ballarat’s latest revisionist project focusing on their permanent collection is the authoritative and comprehensive ‘Light + Shade: Max Meldrum and his followers’. The exhibits are substantially drawn from the gallery’s own holdings, reflecting its hitherto uncelebrated collection in depth of the work of Meldrum and complemented by a few pertinent loans from private collections. Some works were acquired as contemporary art when newly painted, often via acquisitive awards, and others were gifted or bequeathed by supporters of the gallery. Although there is no catalogue, a clear intentionality and backstory is proclaimed by the wall texts and was further elaborated in June this year when Director Louise Tegart together with John and Peter Perry, authors of several books and catalogues on Meldrum and his associates, spoke at a symposium. A central proposition of the exhibition has been to curatorially focus on other tonal artists beyond the ongoing intense attention paid to Clarice Beckett. The second is to draw public attention to Meldrum’s close professional relationship to Ballarat, especially in the 1920s. Both of these goals have been convincingly delivered.  

Meldrum was invited to Ballarat on at least two occasions in the 1920s to present lectures on his controversial theories, and was even celebrated at a civic banquet in his honour attended by the mayor. He was hailed in the press as a world-famous artist whose presence in the city enhanced its cultural standing, although the School of Mines rejected his commissioned 1923 portrait of ‘Mica’ Smith for being too radical. The portrait soon found a willing home at the gallery. Both pupils and patrons resided in the Ballarat region. Notable among these were the local Rowe family who sponsored one of Meldrum’s lecture trips and offered long-term accommodation to both Meldrum and Beckett at different times to paint landscapes at the family property ‘Naringal’, south-west of Ballarat. Maud Rowe was both a friend of Beckett and herself a pupil of Meldrum. Like Beckett, she died relatively young, a year after her friend, and in 1937 bequeathed a notable collection of tonal paintings, including the first Becketts to enter Australian public collections, to the Ballarat, Castlemaine and Geelong galleries. Other paintings by Beckett, Meldrum and fellow artists collected by the Rowe family were destroyed in a fire at ‘Naringal’ in the 1940s. 

Actually, the whole tonal movement was closely linked to Central Victoria as many members of Meldrum’s circle had lived and worked there. Beckett spent parts of her youth in Ballarat, attended the city’s Queen’s College, received her first art training with Ballarat artist Eva Hopkins and later moved to Bendigo with her family. John Farmer came from a Ballarat-based family of miners. Alice Bale was more directly associated with Castlemaine, where she was a vigorous force in cultural and civic life for decades. Amalie Colquhoun (nee Feild) taught for a number of years in the 1920s at the School of Mines before she moved to Melbourne. Not only was she sponsored by her employer to undertake advanced studies at East Sydney Technical College and establish pottery classes in Ballarat, she also designed stained-glass windows for some of the many substantial churches in Ballarat, both indications of her high professional standing in the city’s community. Colquhoun was one of the first of many students to make the two or more hours commute by train from Ballarat to Meldrum’s classes in Melbourne from the 1920s to the 1950s, and with possibly the highest profile. Works from a number of Meldrum’s pupils from the Ballarat district, most of whom did not expand their activities beyond their immediate community, provided some unfamiliar inclusions in ‘Light + Shade’.  

Irene Hewett was the most intriguing of these local artists. Little is known about her, although she is recorded as having exhibited paintings in Ballarat as early as 1913 before she studied with Meldrum. Yet her striking landscape Black Hill, Ballarat (c. 1930s), which she herself presented to the gallery in 1937, resonates at a national level, especially in light of pressing concerns about the impact and sustainability of the mining sector, through the unusual choice to depict a landscape that is blasted and degraded by decades of such activity. This view is dissonant with the golden and prosperous pastoral vistas which are the most familiar trope of Australian interwar painting. Tonal painting’s stark contrasts of light and dark and the aggressive splintering of expected shapes emphasise the bleak and damaged condition of the land and strange eroded profiles of the hill. A greater contrast to the serene, nurturing and mystic approach of Beckett’s landscapes cannot be imagined. Hewett’s Black Hill is also a reminder that Meldrum was not necessarily a conservative thinker. He was an atheist and anti-Nazi defender of free speech and human rights in the 1930s, and such relatively non-conventional thought was shared around his associates.  

Juliette Peers, Ballarat 

Curated by Louise Tegart, ‘Light + Shade: Max Meldrum and his followers’ is at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until 16 October 2022. This is an excerpt from a longer review that will be appearing in the forthcoming Summer 2022–23 quarterly edition.