By Naomi Riddle — 20 April, 2018
‘Dear to me is sleep, dearer still being made of stone.’ Michelangelo Buonarroti, Buonarroti’s Reply (1545-46) I kept thinking of two of Jenny Holzer’s most well-known phrases whilst watching Geng Xue’s video work Poetry of Michelangelo (2015), now showing at Artspace as part of the Sydney Biennale: the first, ‘it is in your self-interest…
By Naomi Riddle — 28 March, 2018
‘We cultivate insomnia, a kind of vigilance against the violence of the world that is always on digital display…We live in 24-7 time, a cosmos where the distinction between night and day shrinks, where age-old circadian rhythms have given way to a block of undifferentiated moments.’ Anna Della Subin, Not Dead But Sleeping (2017), p….
By Naomi Riddle — 9 March, 2018
Fragmented text referencing news and current affairs recurs across Locust Jones’ work for his solo exhibition Hear No Evil / See No Evil at Casula Powerhouse. Much of this text has been overlaid with depictions of crowded scenes: in one there’s a mass of congregated figures, in another, a towering metropolis with a patterned background…
By Naomi Riddle — 21 February, 2018
“Running Dog magazine.’ ‘Running Dog,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ ‘You people still in business?’ ‘Barely.’ ‘Capitalist lackeys and running dogs.’ ‘Someone remembers,’ she said.’ Don DeLillo, Running Dog (1978), p. 30 ‘There is no superiority in making things or in re-making things.’ Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (2015), p. 20 In its first five months of publication Running…
By Naomi Riddle — 1 December, 2017
‘If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.’ Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto (1968) ‘She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.’ Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless (2011) …
By Naomi Riddle — 3 November, 2017
For all its beauty, Sydney’s Observatory Hill is a site steeped in colonial history. On the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation – land that was never ceded – Fort Phillip was built in 1800. It was an important signal station and military outpost before Sydney Observatory was constructed in 1858. Now…
By Naomi Riddle — 27 October, 2017
At the start of the premiere of her performance lecture Corponomy, Eisa Jocson stands with her back to the audience. She is facing a screen, onto which is projected a blank document and the familiar icons of the Mac desktop. Jocson is backlit so her body fills the screen, and her shadow, magnified and imposing,…
By Naomi Riddle — 18 October, 2017
In her current exhibition, Sally Anderson is dealing in metaphor: she is landscape; the landscape becomes her. ‘The earth is a dot’, writes Robert Smithson, and whilst pulling the earth and a dot together allows them to sound as one, there’s still a gap, a breach that comes from placing them side-by-side. Anderson’s paintings nestle…
By Naomi Riddle — 17 October, 2017
‘Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.’ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) ‘Whatever your ear has not heard, hear that What your eyes have not seen, see that.’ Hatef Esfehani, quoted…
By Naomi Riddle — 16 October, 2017
Twelve screens arranged in single file around the gallery space display scenes from Tokyo. One shows a woman walking her dog in a park, the next a swing set, another an almost-still image of flowers in a vase. Some are instantly recognisable as Tokyo’s urban landscape; others are just everyday objects – the mundane and…