Review

Dream Sequence

Urban Theatre Projects

By Erin McFadyen — 11 November, 2020

At the beginning of Urban Theatre Projects’ multi-part series Dream Sequence, Brian Fuata intones, knowingly: ‘welcome again to the digital realm.’ Following Fuata, I want to think about the ways that Dream Sequence holds the dreamlike and the digital together as a cognate pair, collapsing the distinction between the ordinary, intelligible surfaces of our waking…

Fumé

Sarah Rodigari

By Madeleine Martin — 6 November, 2020

Two-hundred-odd elongated beeswax candlesticks hang by their uncut wicks over three wooden dowels. Their smooth, organic contours are appealing, prompting my comrade to pull down her mask in the otherwise empty gallery to inhale their cosy, honeyed scent. The primary function of a candle is to emit light upon ignition, yet these candles are, for…

Pieces of Spaces and Other Places

Carla Cescon and

Tina Havelock Stevens

By Jane O'Sullivan — 9 October, 2020

Flux and change prevail in Pieces of Spaces and Other Places, a collaborative exhibition project by Carla Cescon and Tina Havelock Stevens. The idea of fatalism is handled in different ways: Cescon through tarot and symbolism, and Havelock Stevens through forces of nature. The work of both artists is deeply personal, and about ageing parents….

Holding Patterns Part 2:

Crossing Threads®

By Patricia Arcilla — 25 September, 2020

A few weeks ago, my partner and I travelled to the Philippines—we took a Street View sojourn to my maternal grandparents’ former home in Manila. I remembered the street name, but not the house number, so I typed the name into the address field and clicked slowly along the street—pausing to point out every jeepney…

Bittersweet

curated by Shivanjani Lal

By Suzanne Claridge — 18 September, 2020

‘The ancestors curl and dry to scrolls of parchment. They lie like texts waiting to be written by the children’ David Dabydeen, Coolie Odyssey (1988)    How deep into these pixelated geographies can I possibly go? I ask myself this as I bury the cursor into Google Earth’s digital dirt, until the screen is an assemblage…

Speak So I Can See You

Marija Stojnić

By Olivia Bennett — 4 September, 2020

This is an audio piece written in response to Marija Stojnić’s Speak So I Can See You. Press play on each LISTEN track in sequence within the text to hear the audio components or read the written transcripts provided as notes. •   •   •   Premiering in Australia at the 2020 Melbourne International Film Festival,…

Washing the Dishes:

Reflections on Anne Boyer’s The Undying

By Jennifer Hamilton — 31 July, 2020

‘Cancer messed with the wrong bitch’ is an actual phrase printed on real t-shirts. ‘You got this’ is something people say to acquaintances who announce their diagnoses on Instagram. Both slogans intend to cast the sick person as the victor of a battle, but the battle doesn’t really exist. Moreover, as toneless words on a…

When devices go bump in the night

screensaver watching you

By Lara Chapman — 17 July, 2020

A digital yellow fish swims slowly across my laptop screen, and some coded bubbles rise from the slightly pixelated coral in the bottom corners. This retro screensaver-style homepage is my first encounter with the online exhibition screensaver watching you, hosted by Off Site Project (April 16 – July 19, 2020).  I begin reading the curatorial…

The Summoning of a Polyphonic Apparition

HTTP.PARADISE

By Katie Paine — 26 June, 2020

The online space of the internet stretches out before us. It is a mercurial architecture of ghostly structures, dizzying in scope, a dark space of preternatural networks. We accept images as evidence of events, allowing them to copulate with others, in order to birth thousands of uncanny doubles. This polyphonic realm becomes a demented and…

Alexandra

Andrew Tuttle

By Barnaby Smith — 12 June, 2020

For some time now, the denigration and vilification of suburbia and suburban living has felt passé, not to mention elitist and pretentious. Famous artefacts of popular culture purporting to explore suburbia’s dark underbelly, or lampoon its shallowness—such as the film American Beauty (1999), the television drama Weeds (2005-2012), and even Kath & Kim (2002-2007)—seem dated,…