c3 Contemporary Art Space, Performance Residency, Abbotsford Convent
6 December — 7 December 2019
By David Wlazlo
Often we think about and experience art through the structures of cause and effect. Art, it seems, easily slips into being understood as an effect of some prior cause: the artist is perhaps the most basic causal beginning, and also—digging deeper—the artist's intention, mental health, personal interests, social and economic biography, and even their presumed '...
Guzzler
16 November – 8 December 2019
By Helen O'Toole
Luke Sands has long been interested in the mouth as a technical support for the production of art. His Mouthal sculptures (2014–15), for instance, were made from chewing a range of materials (like books, receipts, metal keyring parts, electrical wire and toy clothing), using saliva and the pressure of his tongue and teeth to bond them together into small, compact forms. Sands' singular 1.84 x 3.13-metre-long Untitled "ch...
This week Memo Review looks back in time, publishing a special long-form ex post facto review of the 2018 NGV Robert Hunter retrospective.
NGV Australia: Ian Potter Centre
27 April – 26 August 2018
By David Homewood
His hair is brushed forward in a modish style that matches with his woollen turtleneck jumper. He stares into the camera lens with an expression that is difficult to describe—neutral, serious, handsome, vacant, boyish, bewildered; it is not qu...
c3 contemporary art space 30 October – 24 November
By Giles Fielke
Not without irony did the late Annette Michelson, writing for the New York Herald Tribune in 1957, note for her American readers that the art of the modernist avant-gardes had become traditional. This she had concluded from her viewing of a set of Robert Delaunay's rhythmic abstract paintings, shown retrospectively in a post-war and post-occupation Paris. R...
Mejia, 33 Tinning Street Brunswick East
1 November 2019
By Audrey Schmidt
Held at the newly opened Mejia gallery on Tinning Street, Brunswick (located near Neon Parc), on November 1st, the In Costume label launch included garments by Melbourne-based Canadian designer Brendan Morris produced with artist, Spencer Lai. The business card-like invitation reflects the label itself. It features a red rubber stamp-like graphic of planet earth with a trucker's cap perched on top and w...
Geelong Gallery
14 September – 24 November 2019
By Marnie Edmiston
It's declared in the title—these are small paintings. Unframed, diminutive and brief sketches attached to mounting boards, they're physically bookended by two larger and more 'substantial' paintings. These works are ephemeral—painted in oil directly on cardboard, these images will deteriorate. We're told by the exhibition text that they were never intended for public viewing. Y...
National Gallery of Victoria
31 October 2019 – 26 July 2020
Rex Butler
Rei Kawakubo's first Comme des Garçons show in Paris in April 1981 is now a legendary event in the history of fashion. Mounted unofficially at the Intercontinental Hotel during Prêt-à-Porter week and featuring just five models—she had not received the favour of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which decided, like the French Academy the century before, who would show duri...
Neon Parc City
16 October – 16 November 2019
In 2010, Elizabeth Newman exhibited a work called 1988, a brown envelope (propped up on a log), on the lower left hand corner of which 'Derrida' is written. The piece can be seen as emblematic of the concerns of much of her work of the last decade or so. Containing Newman's study notes from a course in continental philosophy she took many years before, the humble brown envelope is charged with a suggestion of meaning. Yet its...
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