Presented by Liam Osborne, the young Melbourne artist and director/curator of the Brunswick East gallery Punk Café, Hot Copy is a meditation on themes of boredom, repetition, monotony, uselessness and impactlessness. These themes are charted both in relation to the artist's day-to-day routines (working to pay rent, to make art, etc.) and in relation to the role of Punk Café as a Melbourne artist-run gallery (one that tries to avoid bureaucracy and a boring, box-ticking exhibition program by not having funding, nor a board, nor a call for proposals, but still—like the galleries it opposes—stages exhibitions every few weeks or months, and has done so since it opened in 2015). The sense of boredom, repetition, monotony, uselessness and impactlessness staged by the exhibition is interrupted—but, crucially, only barely—by the residues of violence or disruption that pepper the show. These, too, ultimately fade into scenes of repetition and monotony, giving the exhibition its palpably nihilistic, anti-climactic can't go on/must go on attitude.
