Thank you for your readership and support of Memo Review in 2018. We’re going to take a well-earned break from our weekly review schedule, returning in February 2019.
In the last few months, we have been preparing a publication of the 52 reviews from 2017. Thanks to the hard work of Warren Taylor, Joanna Leucuta, Genevieve Osborn—alongside Memo’s editorial team—we will be launching the book of reviews in January 2019. Stay tuned for information about the launch date. We’d also like to thank th...
Sweeney Reed and Strines Gallery
Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Rd, Bulleen, Victoria, 25 August 2018 – 24 February 2019
By Victoria Perin
PLEASE NOTE: this review contains mentions of suicide and child sex
abuse.
Melbourne's favourite outta-town gallery hits peak-Heide for its summer
shows. Heide's dedicated purpose, a laser-like focus on the circle
around patrons John and Sunday Reed, has been disarmingly effective. The
propaganda research on the couple is now unparalleled...
Katie West, warna (ground)
Caves, Room 18, Level 6, 37 Swanston Street (Nicholas Building)
7 – 22 December 2018
By Paris Lettau
Warna (ground) is a deceptively small exhibition at the artist-run gallery Caves, located on level 6 of the Nicholas Building on Swanston Street. The space itself measures about four-metres squared. The show comprises three small works, each composed of a piece of canvas that Katie West, a Yindjibarndi woman who grew up in rural Western Australia, has dyed us...
Decadent (Im)Possibilities
Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art, AAANZ Conference 2018
School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne
5–7 December 2018
By Audrey Schmidt
Over the last three days, RMIT University School of Art played host to the 2018 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference which was intriguingly titled Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art. Bringing together art historians, theorists, curators, critics and ar...
Does the art exhibition have a future?
Interview with Catherine de Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, Joanna Mendelssohn and Catherine Speck
This week the Art Association of Australian and New Zealand held their annual conference at RMIT University in Melbourne. Given that nearly all of the writers for Memo Review are art historians, we thought that this week we would take up the subject of art history itself. But also, given that Memo Review reviews an art exhibition every week, we thought it would be...
Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa, The Garden of Forking Paths
Buxton Contemporary
7 November 2018 – 17 February 2019
Curated by Shihoko Iida and Melissa Keys
By Rex Butler
It's almost impossible to imagine the influence four small volumes of less than 60,000 words each by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges exerted on Western culture throughout the latter part of the 20th century. Compiled from a selection of short stories and essays originally written in Spanish in the 1930s...
Clement Meadmore: The art of mid-century design
Ian Potter Museum of Art
20 November 2018 – 3 March 2019
By Jane Eckett
Distinctions between art and design are notoriously difficult to make;
the imperative of functionality is far from unique to design while a
concern with communicative strategies and the formal elements of design
(line, colour, volume and so on) are often common to both. The
popularity of those umbrella terms 'creatives' and 'the creative
industries' in present day usage...
Spencer Lai, A smile forms into a grimace mid-slumber as the earth spins—it's funny, such is the sound of laughter—it is like god's hands on the shoulders of a troubled world
Matilda Davis, Too Many Dinner Parties
Bus Projects
31 October – 24 November 2018
By Francis Plagne
The fascination of bad taste continues to exert its somewhat mysterious
pull on certain sub-scenes in the Melbourne artworld. Spencer Lai's
current show in the front room at Bus Projects—part of the gallery's
'Wi...
