Melbourne Now by Amelia Winata
⬤ National Gallery of Victoria | The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 24 Mar - 20 Aug 2023
The NGV has been transformed into the shopping mall of the future, and design is its favoured language of commodity. For the 2023 iteration of Melbourne Now, an emphasis upon design was made apparent as soon as the viewer stepped into the atrium, with schematics for architecturally imagined dwellings and pieces from up-and-coming furniture designers paired with one another. The design aspect is peppered throughout, coming to an agonising crescendo with the design wall brimming with July suitcases and Tontine pillows. Why any of this needed to be included when Melbourne Design Week is only around the corner evades me.
on display as part of the Melbourne Now exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne from 24 March to 20 August 2023. Photo: Sean Fennessey
Not only does design dominate Melbourne, but visual artists have been reframed as designers, or, at the very least, visual merchandisers who seduce us with images. Curators have attempted to create relationships between the design sections and artworks. A deliberate sight line links Megan Streader’s Sky Whispers (2023), a long, darkened gallery illuminated by light tape, and Fashion Now, the gallery dedicated to Melbourne fashion designers, as though the installation is some mockup of a cool runway design. Elsewhere, vision was privileged over substance, reducing three-dimensional objects to images. The logic of sculpture is repeatedly negated. This was evidenced in Nabilah Nordin’s trio of sculptures, pushed up against one another and mashed into a corner.
Amelia Winata is a contributing editor at Memo. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne and the Curator in Residence at Gertrude Contemporary.
