I was at a gathering the other night where I mentioned that I was planning to write my next Stamm piece on the current Louise Bourgeois show at Heide. ‘Oh God, blah blaaah … the mother, the father, the nanny … how many articles have I read about that!?!’ ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ I say, ‘I’m going to […]
Mila Faranov
Semi-urban tragedy: The sad caravans of Stefan Gevers
Sometimes I feel like an emotional wreck. I don’t know how to express myself so, frustrated, I end up in a heap, dejected, rejected, bereft, if not by anyone else, at least by common reason, or rationality. Isolated, even abandoned, inarticulate and mute, feeling unloved and lonely. A self-indulgent deluge of descriptors plagues me. There […]
Some local birds
Why not, I thought. Go local. Pat Brassington’s had enough press already! So has ACCA. It just so happens that my friend Ben Sheppard has a show on round the corner from my house at Counihan Gallery in Brunswick. Excellent! I can walk there! And it just so happens that my friend Amy Jo is […]
Same, same but different or three I liked best
I passed through the sliding doors of MUMA at Monash’s Caulfield campus. How things have changed since I was a student here. We weren’t lucky enough to have this in 1992. Well anyway, as I passed through, the first thing that met my knees, and then my eyes, was a long flat arrangement of objects, mostly […]
The what and the why: Berlinde De Bruyckere
I once ordered an exhibition catalogue from overseas. It came in a brown paper package, beautifully bound, with a 10 x 8 cm image of each represented artist’s work. I lent it and lost it. I remember only one image from that book: a distended headless horse-ness. I saw a preview for Berlinde De Bruyckere’s […]
Damiano Bertoli’s ‘Continuous moment: Anxiety Villa’
I know, because the writing on the wall told me, that this installation is somehow the restaging of a play written by Pablo Picasso. I do not feel it is necessary to know the event passed in order to situate myself into the present work but I can’t help wondering. So I do it. I […]
Alesh Macak: 2 screens, 1 sandpit, music and bench, plus audience
The human remains presents as a type of epistemology. It provokes questions regarding our perception of self and with the super forces of existence and infinity. Caspar David Friedrich meets the New Age in Alesh Macak’s metaphysical meditation on the sublime and our relationship to it. With a sound-track evocative of those hippy–trippy binaural beats and […]
The terror of n: Belle Bassin
In both style and content Belle Bassin’s recent solo exhibition, The terror of n, has a strong resonance with the work of 19th-century spiritualist artist Hilma af Klint. Both artists employ geometric abstraction, meticulous grid work and esoteric symbology that belie the formality, order and control implied by such approaches, instead quietly moving toward an […]