By Soo-Min Shim — 30 May, 2018
In one of the opening scenes of Billy Wilder’s archetypal film, Double Indemnity (1944), the protagonist Walter Neff walks around an unassuming living room typical of the late 1930s. He strolls nonchalantly past an armchair and two everyday lamps, but an ominous feeling still pervades the scene. A long shot frames Walter, causing the shadows…
By Paul Kelaita — 26 April, 2018
My mum’s voice rings out a warning-slash-admonishment in my head: ‘Make sure the stove is off.’ Even though I check regularly, responsibly, maybe excessively, sometimes I don’t trust myself. Other times I’m so lost in thought when checking the stove that I don’t actually check it. It’s this minor, but pervasive, homely anxiety that greets…
By Soo-Min Shim — 23 March, 2018
‘I’m always aware that I was born here the moment I open my mouth’, writes Jason Phu in his latest installation The fruit was sweeter then. The fish were more plentiful. (2018). Showing at Alaska Projects and commissioned by ANTIDOTE, the installation is framed as the sister show to a larger exhibition entitled The Trace (on…
By Em Size — 2 March, 2018
I’m not a bad employee. But since my day job is in an office full of straight cis-men, I inevitably spend more time than I should covertly texting the only gay male in the department. Fortunately we have more in common than just a shared distrust of the heteropatriarchy, so we also text outside of…
By Talia Smith — 23 February, 2018
I look down upon the earth as I’m flying high above, from Sydney to Auckland, and back again. I will repeat this trip in a few months’ time, and then again at Christmas. The ocean always seems to be at its bluest from this height. I think of the Māori legend of Papatuanuku and Ranginui….
By Carolyn Burns — 10 January, 2018
There’s a charming absurdity to many of the individual pieces that make up Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline’s The Visitors, a deceptively simple installation on eco futurist themes. There’s footage of a sapling being carried along a country road in a backpack like an infant in a baby carrier, a porous net veil that enables…
By Cleo Mees — 5 January, 2018
I go into Sip My Ocean, the Pipilotti Rist retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, expecting to encounter some ‘Big Time Sensuality’. This was the title of an earlier review of Rist’s work published in 2011 by The Guardian, and it struck me at the time as a direct reference to the Björk song…
By Paul Kelaita — 21 December, 2017
I used to think the Princes Highway was called the Princess Highway. I was disappointed when I found out it wasn’t. I vaguely remember having a muted argument with one of my sisters about it, incredulous at the news. It was surprising because I hadn’t given the name much thought, so had taken it as…
By Rebecca Gallo — 23 November, 2017
What makes a chair a chair? Legs, a base, a back? How abstract can a chair become before it’s completely unrecognisable – before it turns into a creature or a sculpture or a hatstand? I remember walking through a room – I’m pretty sure it was at the National Gallery of Victoria, or maybe the…
By Sarinah Masukor — 17 November, 2017
For the group exhibition, INSIDE, curators Stella Rosa McDonald and Rafaela Pandolfini have brought together a collection of new and old works that signify unstable, recalcitrant and predominantly female bodies. Some of the nineteen artists included fit this interpretive framework plainly, while others stretch into more complex conceptual terrain – the body, if it is…