Dear readers,
Thank you for your readership in 2019.
We are going to take a short break over January and will return in February with more weekly reviews throughout 2020.
Warm wishes,
The Memo Review team.
Colin McCahon: Letters and Numbers
National Gallery of Victoria
14 November 2019 – April 2020
By Luke Smythe
McCahon's centenary began in August, and to mark the occasion curator Jane Devery has mounted Letters and Numbers, a one-room exhibition featuring all six works from the NGV collection and five loans that are promised to the gallery. The show is weighted heavily toward the later years of McCahon's career, which ran from the late 1930s until the early 1980s. The only work to pr...
Wet Nurse: 110%
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 '...
Luke Sands
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 " c...
Special Issue
This week Memo Review looks back in time, publishing a special long-form ex post facto review of the 2018 NGV Robert Hunter retrospective.
Robert Hunter
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...
Kate Wallace: Views to Remember and Travis MacDonald: Clock Face
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...
In Costume
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...
Collection leads: John Scurry—small paintings
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...
