Melbourne Now by Tristen Harwood, Calia O‘Rouke, and Indi Jennings
⬤ National Gallery of Victoria | The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 24 Mar - 20 Aug 2023
Melbourne Now (2023) might be a great advertisement for leaving Victoria, but as a kind of advertisement or marketing event or whatever you call it the exhibition’s reverence for the state aspires to something more like the slushy nationalism in Qantas’s I Still Call Australia Home (1987). While the “iconic,” callow, settler-supremacist Qantas advert taps into the sentimental hope for the future/nation represented in the figure of the child (the children’s choir no less), the perennially slow off the mark NGV opts for a different tact.
The oldest gallery in Australia has assembled their exhibition/events from a decidedly older milieu of designers, conceptual entrepreneurs, publishers, architects, and artists (the NGV does still show some art). I’m not making a criticism about the participants biological age here—the kids have Top Arts so why shouldn’t Melbournian adults get a go too—it’s just that the whole show just feels stale, like a TV rerun of an episode I’ve already seen, or like a natty wine gone warm, a long black gone cold.
Tristen Harwood is an Indigenous writer, living and working on Wurundjeri Country and Boon Wurrung Country.
Calia O’Rourke is an artist and writer born in Ngunnawal/Canberra now based in Naarm/Melbourne. She produces installations and writes poetry and prose exploring the (meta)physical body and connection with the white cube and the blank page. Calia has displayed work at the VCA Artspace (it’s my first time, 2020; Spoon, 2021) and at Colour Club in 2022, as well as having poetry published in No More Poetry’s ‘NO NO NO MAG’ in 2022. She is currently in her final year of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts.
