by Sam Beard.

One of the great failings of Dispatch Review is the lack of coverage that has been afforded to John Curtin Gallery over the last couple of years. Several major exhibitions have slipped by, including the likes of proppaNOW’s major exhibition Occurrent Affair, Susan Flavell’s Horn of the Moon – 13 Goddesses, IOTA24 Codes in Parallel, the Brett Whiteley: Inside the Studio exhibition, Aziz Hazara’s Bow Echo, and the particularly uneven, though still notable, Regional Arts Triennial: Open Borders. While the past two years have included some significant shows, one recurring theme has been a less-than-critical approach to regional arts—a topic the Gallery has seemed to champion, but through survey shows that ultimately are more like visual art buffets than coherent examinations of a subject.
        This year’s Perth Festival offerings from John Curtin Gallery (JCG) are two solo exhibitions, both concentrating on focused bodies of works—Alice Guiness’s Burndud Ground and Mai Nguyễn-Long’s Doba Nation. The text that accompanies Nguyễn-Long’s work positions it as culminating from the artist’s explorations into family history and cultural identity. Nguyễn-Long considers her Vietnamese, Australian and Irish-Samoan heritage as vital to her creative work, along with periods spent living and traveling in China and Vietnam. In the cavernous dark gallery, Nguyễn-Long’s clay sculptures are bunched together on three travel crate-cum-plinths and the floor. Low to the ground and in the void of a darkened gallery, the figures and forms become diminutive, almost shrinking before you. This was the first peculiar choice for the exhibition. Images of other installations of Nguyễn-Long’s work seem to favour their scale, such as the display at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, currently at QAGOMA; in this larger installation, the clay sculptures are raised off the ground to about waist height. It is a display that appears more intimate and striking—given the bright lighting that reveals more of the earth tones and brilliant oranges of the sculptures—than the JCG display.
        JCG curator Lia McKnight describes the assortment of clay figures and forms as “humorously defiant” in the exhibition brochure. While an apt description, and true to the works’ affective qualities, what seems disjointed or in deep contrast is the introductory information in the gallery, which asserts that these humorous, or “deskilled”, sculptures are deeply connected to cultural and individual trauma. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with the idea of using humour as a disarming or subversive way of communicating ideas about trauma—but instead that the proposed subject and the interpreted subject (or, put differently, the objects themselves) appear at odds. Reading up on Nguyễn-Long’s work, it is through subtleties that one is meant to deduce these linkages between the sculptures and specific aspects of history and trauma. For example, it is said that the use of bright orange is to allude to the highly toxic herbicide Agent Orange that U.S. forces used to defoliate landscapes during the Vietnam War. On paper, the reference rings true. However, visually, in the gallery, the chance of coming to such a conclusion is tenuous.
        It was during her trip through Vietnam that Nguyễn-Long spent time marveling at the rustic wood carvings that adorn the đình (communal halls) of northern Vietnam. Another influence on Nguyễn-Long’s work is the aesthetic of mộc mạc (meaning ‘earthy’). In her doctorate—the research that informs much of Nguyễn-Long’s current work—she utilises mộc mạc as a concept to shift the viewers’ mode of understanding from a “Western fine art” aesthetic toward a Vietnamese aesthetic. Rather than considering the work as playfully naïve, it seems far more apt to attempt to consider the work through the idea of mộc mạc—the tactile clay forms, simple in design and earthy in tones demonstrating a kind of artistic restraint. Yet for all their organic-ness, in the dim gallery, one feels hard pressed to say the experience supports this kind of aesthetic appreciation. Among the vessels, pellets, and poo-shaped dollops, are several of Nguyễn-Long’s recurring motifs, such as Vomit Girl, a figure that takes various forms. Vomit Girl is among the more audacious motifs that equate to their titular satire, as well as their seemingly subversive intentions. The Vomit Girl figures often present a kind of verticality that has them rising upward, like deities of a kind, while simultaneously spewing—varying in each incarnation. Among the cute little poo-pellets and decorative forms, the Vomit Girls are the main protagonists and certainly the most intriguing players in the show.
        While much of the literature that accompanies the exhibition speaks to “claiming space”, “community”, and examining “trauma”, it is difficult to deduce this from the objects themselves, which appear open to far more readily available interpretations (one could be forgiven for not doing the readings and interpreting them as part of the broader trend of zany ceramics). This struggle to determine the visual correlation between subject and object could, on the one hand, be argued as systemic of the practice-led PhD process that often finds artists going to great lengths to intellectualise their practice beyond the pragmatic, often resulting in seemingly outlandish claims. On the other hand, one could also argue that this show is perfectly befitting of a university gallery, asking viewers to craft abstruse associations between the logic of the artist and the forms on display.

Mai Nguyễn-Long’s Doba Nation is on display at the John Curtin Gallery, and runs 7 February – 17 April 2025.

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Image credits: All artworks by Mai Nguyễn-Long, on display at John Curtin Gallery. Photographed by the author.

by Stirling Kain.

For as long as I’ve been an arts worker, and long before meeting her, Jo Darbyshire has been on the periphery of my awareness. This comes as no surprise: she has curated and exhibited in Perth/Boorloo (and further afield) for decades.
        When I learnt that Jo had been invited to curate an exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre, with the curatorial premise being local protests, my interest was piqued immediately. I was skeptical about the potency of such an exhibition positioned within a local government context. I reflected on this as someone who has worked in arts roles at various local governments for many years, and participated in both the successes and shortcomings of this bureaucracy.
        To spend this time with Jo has been an education in how to sustain a vigorous practice. She is both gentle and forthright. She actively welcomes others’ opinions, but never minces her words. This balance in her personality is, I feel, one of the reasons she is a well-regarded, prolific artist. She is driven to produce artistic outcomes that speak unwaveringly to this time, and its politics: a drive that is, ultimately, from a place of genuine care for others.
        Desperate Measures is a showcase of objects from the City of Fremantle’s Civic and Art Collections, curated by Jo Darbyshire. The exhibition draws its name from the Fremantle-based theatre group, mostly active between 1977–1985. The Desperate Measures troupe wrote and performed political street theatre, led protests and demonstrations in Fremantle, and ran workshops with incarcerated people in prisons.
        Desperate Measures works well in the context of Fremantle Arts Centre because Jo has designed the exhibition so as to highlight the aligned interest between the values of the Desperate Measures troupe, and local government, never compromising on the important aspects of protests by the troupe. At its best, local government celebrates and supports the community—for all its potency and, at times, dowdiness. Jo recognises this spirit, and highlights the way artists rallied (and continue to rally) with the broader community to generate change—manifest in City of Fremantle Council minutes, an object which features in Desperate Measures.
        The artist I have subsequently come to know—in equal parts straight-talking and compassionate—is the one you will encounter below.

Stirling Kain: Tell me about your intention and your background as a curator, and as a researcher, and as an activist. I don't know if you consider yourself an activist, I haven't talked to you about that yet.

Jo Darbyshire: I prefer to call myself an artist-curator, because I think artists can be activists by their very nature. We're taught in art school to question things, to come up with alternatives, and to not be stopped. That's probably one of the best things about being an artist—you learn to go around obstacles and to think more laterally about problems. I think it's quite powerful to be an artist-curator.

SK: So for you, maybe 'curator' doesn't have that inherent sense of activism, but the word 'artist' does, and you include the sense of activism when you call yourself an artist-curator?

JD: In my mind, I like to think of the artist as being an activist. I mean, many artists are not, but putting 'artist' and 'curator' together, that is, for me, one of the great joys of life—when I'm allowed to curate an exhibition and I can use some of the skills that I have learned as an artist.

SK: I want to return to what we talked about a few weeks ago, when we were at the Fremantle Arts Centre, and one of the first things we talked about—how does a protest exhibition sit in a local government gallery context? Initially, I was thinking, ‘does the exhibition become less radical in that local government context, or does the gallery become more politically radical?’ And now I’ve seen your exhibition, I've been thinking that it really depends on the intent, and who's involved.

JD: It really depends on whether it's supported all the way up the line, and if you've got a manager or a person that's really supportive of the message being given, that is unimpeded, not sanitized. As soon as you sanitize anything, you kill it. Society is not sanitized, but people love to sanitize in museums, and they love to sanitize things in local government. City of Fremantle has been fantastic, because they trusted me—there's been no censorship and they're happy for this to be seen as a historical exhibition. But this exhibition is not trying to be political or controversial. I never try to be controversial. I just think history is controversial. It's how you interpret it, and when—the context.
        I was asked to work with the curator Andre Lipscombe, and with the City of Fremantle Art and Civic Collections. The curators in the past would not have collected work, thinking that one day these works would be used in an exhibition about activism in Fremantle. So, they didn't really buy those works or acquire them for that purpose. But I think if you allow outside curators to come in, we can make meaning out of what is in those collections.
        In this exhibition, we've also included a ceremonial plaque from one of the US nuclear warships that came in the ‘80s—and a hell of a lot of them did come to Perth and Fremantle. Most councils have these plaques from these US ships. And no one usually knows what to do with them. They're stuck in a cupboard somewhere, and then they're de-politicized—they're just a gift from that ship. So, to put them in a context—you've got the anti-nuclear protesters, showing their banners on the ship, which we've got photographs of—and to juxtapose the plaque next to it—is to show the connection between local government and the protests. They were welcomed by the council and the mayor, and then at the same time, they weren't welcomed by the local community. And quietly, I'm trying to make those connections visible to people and to say, ‘well, we're in exactly the same situation right now.’

SK: I've been thinking about a museological framework for protest exhibitions and using collections. I don't know if you saw the exhibition 1948: Palestine in Pictures, at Pakenham Street Art Space, with Cool Change Contemporary?

JD: Yeah, it was fantastic.

SK: It was really wonderful. And I felt it adopted a museological framework like Desperate Measures. And I wonder if that was informed by the fact that the people depicted, the Palestinian community, many of them had left their ancestral homes. The exhibition reflects what they were able to bring with them when they immigrated—small, flat objects like photographs. Reflecting on that exhibition, alongside Desperate Measures—what is it about using that museological framework and collections, within the context of a protest exhibition, that works so well? There's something particularly that you are drawn to, and I think that framework works really well in other protests exhibitions as well.

JD: What I liked about that exhibition—they used a whole range of objects and photos. They had vintage and contemporary photos, and vintage and contemporary objects. They put it together in a way that was more Installation than didactic interpretation. They also had sparse and beautifully curated text. They had quotes and video, and they also had a little bit of writing to put the exhibition in context. I love exhibitions like that—what I would call ‘encyclopedic’—using all the things that are available, to really draw people into the story.
        You always need objects, I think, or really great photos—and this is where the visual arts come in—you're creating an opportunity for people to become bodily immersed in what they call a 'history exhibition.' Because history is often presented as didactic and dull—and sometimes it really can be. You can just kill history by how it's put together. But that exhibition, and I'm hoping the exhibitions that I do, try to make people bodily connected to what they're reading and what they're seeing. So, using text in a kind of visual way.
        Sometimes you can't get to do that, because graphic designers tend to have a format. You know, they have the wall text, so they have the little label text that goes next to the object. I like to play around with those. I think that often the information that's in the little wall text is actually really vibrant and interesting.

SK: You definitely played with that in Desperate Measures, with the text being so physically large. And I also happened to see those conversations you had with the graphic designer right at the end. You were saying that the text in the panels was the incorrect size. And, on this occasion, that wasn't the graphic designer's fault, but that was a really important part for you.

JD: It is. I like to design exhibitions. I really have to have a visual idea in my head about the connection between that photo and the text next to it. You know, there are exhibitions where you just have wall label after wall label, and it's all the same, and it's all designed within a format. I prefer to prioritize the important text.
        Cool Change Contemporary did this as well, with 1948: Palestine in Pictures. The bigger text: people are going to read that first. So, you make that the priority text. And then if people think 'I'm really interested in this little story', then they go into it further, and they might get the subtext, or they might read another little story around that, or they might understand a joke at the end. 
        Some people just walk into a history exhibition and they just want to look at the photos. So to have really interesting photos is fantastic. And in this show, I was really careful not to have too many photos, but to choose photos that were going to be super interesting for people, to draw people in and think, ‘oh, am I in the photo, or do I know someone in the photo?’ People love to interact with photographs.

SK: Something that I think about as an arts worker is that people often first go to the text, the explanation, and not the image. But in a history exhibition, you're saying that's reversed, and maybe it's because people think that they'll see themselves or someone they know, that they have a really personal connection to, in those images.

JD: I think people resist a lot of text. But if you are trying to get a story across you have to have facts, and you have to present them in a way that is not too didactic, but actually truthful—like if someone speaks in their own voice. That's also important.

SK: It's interesting that you say ‘truthful’. I think honesty is real when it includes people's voice. The way they speak, but then, their feelings as well.

JD: I agree with you. When you have people speaking, that's their truth. You can also have negative voices, and they are good to have in an exhibition about history, because they show what people were fighting against. So for instance, that little newspaper article in Desperate Measures, which headlines the then-Premier of Western Australia calling activists ‘evil’. That was just gold, because you could see the conservative forces that people were acting against. It's also quite humorous, because politicians often shoot themselves in the foot. You're just presenting the truth of what they said.

SK: And I'm thinking of that one quote from the Desperate Measures exhibition, one person talking about their experiences seeing Lesbian women on stage and performing.

JD: That was really fantastic. One of the Desperate Measures performers wrote to me—she said, ‘we weren't overtly into Queer stuff at that time, but we were exploring Feminism. And then, as part of that, we started to have Lesbian relationships.’ And she actually said, ‘when I was on tour to Adelaide, I became a Lesbian!’

SK: That's right, yeah! That's it.

JD: And so I wrote back to her and I said, ‘can I use that quote?’ Because it saves me having to be didactic. And saves me putting something into the text saying, 'oh, and Desperate Measures had lots of Lesbians involved', you know? It says a lot more than me just saying the bare information.

SK: How do you see protest happening today, as compared to Desperate Measures? What is the same, what’s different? For better or worse.

JD: I think there are definitely things happening, and in a different way to what Desperate Measures did. Hopefully with just as much fun, and also that commitment to it. That's going to be the crux in the future—how we work together as activists.

SK: You're absolutely right. I'm thinking that protest now looks very different to what Desperate Measures were doing—specifically, the artists I've seen protesting recently at fundraisers, they're performing in venues like the Buffalo Club.

JD: The aim of Desperate Measures was to do things publicly. I think everyone's gone a bit underground or online. There's certainly been consequences recently for artists that have even liked posts online. Big consequences for West Australian artists.

SK: I've been meaning to speak to you about that. I know recently in Sydney there was a climate protest to stop traffic on the Sydney Harbor Bridge, two of the protesters were charged.[1] Their jail sentences were successfully appealed, but one of the protesters was convicted of related charges. I'm interested in what you think—does that kind of response from the state influence how people protest?

JD: Absolutely. The protests that I have been arrested for—which were Roxby Downs uranium mine, Pine Gap in 1983, and, more recently, Roe 8—I would only get arrested when I knew that there was a big group of people getting arrested at the same time, and that we had pro bono lawyers ready to look after us, and bail us out. So I would not encourage anyone to go and do their own project and get arrested by themselves. Always do it with a group, and always have a lawyer.
        All of these anti-nuclear [Project Iceberg] protesters that were arrested on US war ships in the ‘80s—they had lawyers, and those lawyers are still around. They organized themselves well, to keep things safe and to keep it non-violent. They all did ‘non-violent action training’, which was a weekend workshop where you learnt how to resist the police, but not to resist arrest.

SK: That reminds me of a conversation I had recently—someone commented that protesters and artists often have a really strong understanding of bureaucracy, because they have to navigate the bureaucracy.

JD: I think artists should break rules, but only when they know what the rules are. And only when it's better to break the rule than to keep it. I believe that's the same for activism.

SK: That's such a powerful statement. And you, personally, navigate bureaucracy by working within museum and art collections. That’s part of your protest and activism.

JD: I think it's great to invite artists to do exhibitions in museums. I mean, we just enliven them. 

SK: Yeah, absolutely. We have spent time talking about that before—how archives can be living and breathing, but people have to imbue them with breath. They have to be used.

JD: That's beautiful. And a lot of people are afraid to let those archives be used in that way. Artists are not often welcomed into museums as curators. We have to claim that space. But once we are given the opportunity—we contribute to New Museology discourses, and we've really changed things in museums. Fred Wilsons' Mining the Museum exhibition, which showed slave shackles within a very traditional museum—he really changed the whole discourse. From there, other artists have worked with museums and really changed things as well. It's great to make history live. To make people realise: one, they're part of it, just in their ordinary, everyday lives. And two, the history that's not told is often the most interesting. When I did The Gay Museum…

SK: I'm so excited to talk about The Gay Museum! I love The Gay Museum!

JD: Did you see it?

SK: No, it was before my time, but I read your essay about it, and I loved it.[2]

JD: I knew that I wanted to go in and make an exhibition about gay and lesbian history in WA, but I couldn't until 2002, when the law changed.[3] Before that, institutions couldn't 'promote homosexuality'. As soon as we got that law reform, I went in and asked them, 'I want to do this'. Luckily, the Director of the Museum at the time, Dr. Gary Morgan, had just worked with Brooke Andrews at the Sydney Museum—so he said, 'okay'. It was quite a conservative Museum and there was a lot of resistance from the history department, from lots of people.
        I had to be an enrolled master’s student to make The Gay Museum. They wouldn't let me just come in as an artist. But I had a fantastic supervisor called Mat Trinca, and he really helped me. And I got a lot of support from staff who were just waiting for someone to do something like this in the Museum. I wanted to bring something from every single department, to say: being gay, or being Lesbian, or Homosexual is not something that is outside of anything. We are part of everything.
        For instance, they wanted me to bring in panels and stick them on the wall. And I said, no, no—I want to paint the walls black, and I want to have text panels really embedded in the space visually, so that we actually are part of the museum. It was a big project, but it was amazing. I worked with the community, and I worked trying to find empirical evidence. That was very difficult, because there was hardly anything—there was nothing collected in the Museum.
        When I first went to the history department, I said that I wanted to physically look at all the collections. They said, no, no—you have to put search words into the catalogue. So, of course, what came up was one AIDS t-shirt, from South Australia. That was literally it.

SK: Ha!

JD: Then I found this crab—it was called a Shame-faced crab. And I thought, 'this is perfect.' So, I was able to talk about how museums think that they are objective, and yet they often name things with subjective meaning. So, I used that crab to talk about how Homosexuals were conditioned to feel shame, and how that affected their lives.
        I found an electric shock machine in the Museum—which was in a medical section. It would have been kept for a medical display. But I put it near the Shame-faced crab, and talked about how gay men went through this terrible ‘conversion’ treatment. Right up to about 1978, they would be electrocuted with this machine to try and make them not gay; shocking them when they were shown pictures of naked men. That happened right here in WA, at Heathcote Hospital.[4]
        And in that same exhibition, one of my art students at Edith Cowan University showed me his collection of ‘used soaps’, and I begged to use them. I displayed them next to the electric shock machine. All of these used soaps were not only beautiful as an installation, but they talked about trying to clean that ‘stain’ of Homosexuality, the shame that people felt in those days. So, taking things out of their normal context and using them metaphorically or poetically, or juxtaposing them with text that gave them a different context pertinent to gay and lesbian people, made a big difference.

SK: You would never have found the electric shock machine just by searching 'gay' and 'lesbian', or found it at all, unless you were looking for an electric shock machine. We've been talking about archives, and it's really important to think about how people might use them, in order to know how to categorise the objects. You have to future-craft in that way. And there are methodologies to researching and archiving that people can be educated in—but these things might change over time.

JD: Being able to have search words in an archive is important. You're right. However, I found the electric shock machine by looking physically through the collection. I would work for hours, searching through, and not find anything. And then suddenly you would come across something. And think, ‘wow, that's perfect.’ Like the Shame-faced crab was just perfect.

SK: Do you find that when you're making artwork as well, for example, paintings?

JD: Yeah.

SK: That's what I find in my practice, too. It can be a lot of nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you find something.

JD: Yeah. And that moment of joy, where it just comes.

SK: The curatorial research looks similar in the way it unfolds, to the making process of art.

JD: Putting yourself there, doing all the hard work to allow something to come—I think that's what painting is. And I think that's what curating an exhibition like this is. I did a lot of work contacting people about Desperate Measures and then asking them to send me stories.
        A good example—Kati Thamo told me how she and Mandy Browne had ridden bikes up to Perth and did some graffiti on a public wall, which said, 'There once was a land full of laughing trees'. That graffiti stayed there for years, and someone made artwork about it, but Kati didn't know who. I searched online and found that we had a beautiful image in the State Art Gallery, and in the National Gallery as well. Screenprints had been made by Peter Clemesha, using a photograph he'd taken of the graffiti. That was one of those moments where I just thought, 'oh my God'. Peter Clemesha lives in Fremantle, and he never knew who made the graffiti. Kati and Mandy knew someone had made art about it, but they never saw it again. So, to bring them together was one of those great serendipitous stories about that time.

SK: It's interesting how these images relating to, and objects used for, protests are then acquired by institutions.

JD: They're starting to be. Initially, for Roe 8, they didn't want anything, but we collected everything ourselves, and we did work with the community. We made a database. There was a lot of art: posters, t-shirts, tea towels, banners. Even concrete Lock-on Barrels. We managed to save two of those out of the Roe 8 bush. One of those has gone to the WA Museum, and one has gone to the National Museum. I was pretty pleased to see the WA Museum collecting Disrupt Burrup stuff.

SK: I don't know how to feel about that yet.

JD: Well, they don't know how to exhibit them yet!

SK: I'm thinking about the Perspex that Joana Partyka spray-painted at the AGWA Disrupt Burrup Hub action from 2023. It was recently acquired by the WA Museum. She’s facing charges for her protest—but another state-funded institution only five-hundred meters away can acquire the object for its collection?

JD: But as Alec Coles [Director, WA Museum] said—the Museum's job is to collect both sides of an issue. In the past, they haven't. There are a lot of things that have never been collected, like women's history, and multicultural history. These were colonial institutions, and they looked at everything through that empirical lens. It's only since New Museology came on the scene—since the ‘80s and ‘90s—when people questioned the role of museums, that things have changed.
        I think it's great that the Museum is collecting that protest material. It has to question itself as well. That's what happened in The Gay Museum. The museum was asked to question its own collecting practices, and its own curatorial practices. I think that was quite challenging for them, but they did. It really depends a lot on who's working in those places as well, as to what gets collected.

Desperate Measures: Art, Politics and Performance in Freo 1977 –1985, Fremanlte Arts Centre, 9 November 2024 – 27 January 2025.

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Jo Darbyshire was born in 1961 in Perth, Western Australia. She studied Fine Arts at Curtin University in 1981, a Postgraduate Diploma at Canberra School of Art in 1991 and a Master of Creative Arts in Cultural Heritage at Curtin University of Technology in 2004.

Stirling Kain is an arts worker and artist in Perth (Boorloo). As an arts worker, she produces art festivals and events. Her photography practice involves film and darkroom techniques. Kain graduated with a Bachelor of Art (History of Art maj., History min.) from the University of Western Australia in 2020.

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Footnotes:

1. See https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/15/climate-activist-deanna-violet-cocos-15-month-jail-sentence-overturned-on-appeal

2. See https://www.jodarbyshire.com/uploads/text-files/gay_museum_catalogue.pdf

3. See https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/prod/filestore.nsf/FileURL/mrdoc_7865.pdf/$FILE/Law%20Reform%20(Decriminalization%20of%20Sodomy)%20Act%201989%20-%20%5B00-00-00%5D.pdf?OpenElement

4. Tony Thomas, ‘Homosexuals and Perth’, The Critic, University of Western Australia, vol.8, no.10, 1968, p.94.

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Images courtesy of the Fremantle Arts Centre.

With Darren Jorgensen, Sam Beard, Aimee Dodds, Francis Russell, and Tara Heffernan.

As the year draws to a close, Dispatch Review invited a group of critics and regular contributors to reflect on the past year and share their thoughts on what, perhaps, 2025 might bring.

What is your highlight of 2024?

On 21 October, the West Australian newspaper reported that “Art Gallery of WA director Colin Walker unveils ambitious plans for the ‘most modern’ gallery in the world.” Otherwise, the internet is completely silent on what should be the highlight of Perth’s art news of 2024. Did someone get the story wrong? If so, then artists, budding curators, and collectors should all benefit, as big public galleries tend to generate more public interest in the visual arts, as well as more funding and support for local scenes.

John Curtin Gallery quietly delivered some of the most significant exhibitions of 2024, including the Brett Whiteley studio show, IOTA’s Codes in Parallel, The Strelley Mob, and an excellent selection of paintings surveying the career of Aida Tomescu. Of particular interest to me was the Brett Whiteley exhibition, as it demonstrated the strengths and shortcomings of an artist with great facility held back both by his own eagerness to skim off the top of art history (revealed in often hokey appropriations). This tension snaps into clarity upon viewing the best of his work, the intimate studio scenes and sketches. It was also nice to see the main gallery painted white, as gloomy, dark-lit exhibitions are becoming a fad (with the exception of The Strelley Mob, which utilised dramatic lighting to complement the work).

The End of History exhibition at LWAG (18 May–27 Aug) was a gluttonous visual feast that showcased the curatorial wizardry of Gemma Weston (and the extended LWAG exhibition team). Great catalogue. Great install. Kudos to ‘em for dealing with ‘80s weirdness so well—connecting the era's various apocalyptic social concerns without making it utterly depressing to visit; hinting at the persistent artworld hangover (collectively suffered) from too much passion Pop, male-artist, ego-centric ‘80s wankerism (and gesturing to potential remedies for it); aesthetically wrangling big, senseless, and probably post-Soviet-inspired whopping sculptures with good, bad, and ugly collection paintings, and making the above, frankly, enjoyable to peruse. The brilliant and informative review by Francis Russell (in Dispatch) completely upended any easy conclusions I'd reached and made me re-rethink what I'd seen and read. I wished I could've returned to the show with Franco's text as my guide, but it had already ended.

State of Abstraction at AGWA and The End of History at LWAG stand out as particularly thought provoking shows, in that, even where those shows didn't quite work for me I felt their respective impasses and lacunae were fascinating. It was also a highlight to see a string of very promising shows by emerging artists like Nick Fitzpatrick, Jacob Kotzee, Isabel Bereczky, and Matt Brown.

What is a lowlight of 2024?

A snazzy new public gallery, something like GOMA or Sydney Modern, will spell death and despair for artists in Perth. Every other state in Australia has rushed to spend big bucks on these infernal art megaplexes, but they leave locals behind. In Melbourne, the expanded National Gallery of Victoria has become so dominating that council and community galleries are no longer viable, bypassed for the latest action in the city. MONA has swallowed everything that once made Hobart liveable, and in Brisbane, the state government can barely afford to keep GOMA’s monstrous spaces open, let alone support struggling local artists.

The disappearance of The Pretext. Also, the cancellation of Sculpture by the Sea. Perhaps it has run its course, but it is sad to see the oddity of Sculpture by the Sea come to a close after bringing such eccentricities and excesses as the “Master’s Milk Carton Boat” by Ellen Broadhurst, Tom Rogers, and Jaxon Waterhouse, or the gargantuan Homer (the Greek) x Homer (the Simpson) inflatable by Dave Glass. One can only hope that some Cottesloe benefactor might fork out a little dosh to bring this peculiar event back in 2026.

What do you want to see more of in 2025?

Fremantle Arts Centre gets back on its feet. Tim Burns with a megaphone. Sculpture by the Sea. Video by Makaela Rowe-Fox. Paintings by Penny Coss. Paintings by Demond Mah. Bill’s PC. Big, complex woven things by Emma Buswell. Graduate shows. Disneyland Paris. Dispatch events. Erin Coates. The Fremantle Biennale. Curtis Taylor. The 2025 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference. Hatched. The Pretext. Shannon Lyons. Kamile Gallery. Hearts of Darkness. Paper works by Clare Wohlnick. Scout shirts by Jess Day. Paintings by Naomie Hatherley. Big puffy weirdness by Tarryn Gill. Something new from Dan McCabe. Tony Windberg’s Martian pyrography. Quicker exhibition turn-arounds. More art, more often please.

More dedication to discipline specificity, thorough research, and a growing wariness of edu-tainment culture and bureaucratised accessibility protocols. Hopefully, we’ll see more investment in fostering critical para-academic spaces, balanced with a genuine effort to preserve institutions (less “institutional critique” and more pragmatic interest in bettering the teaching of the humanities and the creative arts within the university).


More funding for art that is not commercially viable and less funding for art that is! It’s about time there was more philanthropy for the arts in WA (and there are the telltale signs that there will be, for sure). Yet, why publicly fund art that will likely end up above the Moroso sofa of a Mosman Park home?

The Pretext, honest shows, new faces in high-up arts jobs, risk-taking, original/skilful uses of medium and material, diversification of arts funding sources relative to the WA and Aus economies, private donors supporting independent and small-scale projects, intergenerational collaborations, and arts festivals happening in calendar times other than the middle of Perth's summer.

I desperately want to see a wider pool of art critics and theorists writing in 2025—for Dispatch or otherwise. We have an impressive range of philosophers, novelists, cultural critics, historians, and of course artists in our own backyard, but there seems to be a great deal of hesitation when it comes to writing about contemporary art. I honestly don't know how to improve this situation, but in 2025 I would love to see a wider embrace of dialogue as the starting point for understanding art. The event of understanding art happens in the cafe, the pub, and the group chat just as much—if not more so!—than the gallery or museum. Don't feel like you have to start with a granular understanding of art and its history to begin thinking with and through a work of art; instead, use the work as a point of departure to talk to others and to think critically and speculatively. Returning to the work—its author, context, history, politics, etc.—is an important and unavoidable step, but don't feel like that task has to come before the fundamental act of sharing with others why you are or aren't moved by something.

What do you want to see less of in 2025?

Balancing Act at AGWA, the collection show of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art on the ground floor, has been there so long I can’t remember a time before it. I had shiny blonde hair when I first smiled at Mavis Petyarre’s Painted Car Door (1990) and had gone grey when I tried to explain Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (1994) to my teenager. Now I am balding, the gallery has been spending on new acquisitions, and the same old stuff is sitting there. Can we bring something else up from the basement, please?

Faux contrarianism, “scene” reports, and “personal narrative” in art criticism: tired formulas that harmonise to demonstrate the malleability and philistinism of the aging trend-vampires that presently dominate the arts.

Multiple or too many (e.g. three) reviews of one boring (considered lame, slack, or broadly “undeserving” by audience consensus) exhibition taking up valuable real estate within a more-or-less weekly art criticism series, as it were.
I can sense the reader's eyes rolling already but I don't think we can afford less of anything in WA at the moment. I'd happily take more of everything, even the bad stuff—hey, especially the bad stuff, you've got to start somewhere!

by Max Vickery and Erin Russell.

‘The womens sewing room was my grandmother’s workplace. Made me cry.’

‘I feel both uneasy and comforted. It’s a vivid reminder of the one fact all humans have in common—death and decay.’

‘Hey Pete, I can go into my shed and see this shit.’

‘Loved the sticky floor. Total immersion.’

‘“Achoo”’

These are just a few selections one might find leafing through the guest book as they exit TIME • RONE. Public response has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s easy to see why. Rone borrows from a variety of internet/pop culture codes and aesthetics, working with both real and imagined histories as the raw material for his show’s evocations. The conventions of urbex, dark academia, liminal spaces, and a certain brand of post-apocalypticism undergird the nostalgia which the exhibition provokes. TIME • RONE isn’t just a lamentation for the past, it is also an elegy for the present. It’s a trite, common-sense (but effective!) message delivered as a spectacle: ‘For everything there is a season…’ As we traipse from room to room across dingy, sticky floors and through dim, intermittent lighting, we are reminded that luxuries decay, social relations shift, and economies atrophy. We know we aren’t living in the post-war boom any more, but how do we feel about it, and how does Rone feel about it?
        The exhibition is clearly concerned with women’s labour and industrial production in the post-war era. The natural course through TIME • RONE’s Perth iteration leads the viewer through these spaces of women’s labour first; the Workroom in the downstairs area and the Switch Board Room in the upstairs area. While the Workroom is somewhat spatially isolated, the Switch Board Room is the entry point for a kind of pentatych. After a short detour into the Mail Room and a stroll through the Waiting Room, one enters the Typing Pool. This space is littered with the traces of dreams and desires: a draft of a love-letter, a plan for the second chapter of a novel, an open recipe book. There are also signs of conflict, some latent and some less so, including a notice of poor performance lying across one of the desks, and a sign advertising an upcoming promotion. These documents are among the show’s most compelling moments. One exits this part of the exhibition through the Head Office, a choice which gesticulates towards a vague sense of gender and class politics in a quite satisfying way. The newspapers which fill the glass cabinets in the hallway outside, reproductions of the pages of 1950s issues of West Australia’s Sunday Times, are a welcome curiosity.
        At the other end of the hall from the Head Office are the paired spaces of the Pharmacy and Clock Room, and, opposite them, the Art Room. The Pharmacy and Clock Room together indicate a turn from production to consumption. The Pharmacy features brightly coloured magazines, newspapers, and a few scattered vials, while the walls of the Clock Room are filled with boxes of goods stamped with vintage logos. These are perhaps the least interesting areas of the exhibition. The titular clock in the Clock Room is more than a little heavy-handed, the player piano tucked in behind the commercial shelving would probably have been a sufficient reminder that the exhibition is about the passage of time. For a more exhilarating and quirky experience of mid- to late-twentieth century medical technology these reviewers would recommend a visit to the WA Medical Museum near King Edward Maternity Hospital in Subiaco. (See if you can spot the Asthma Cigarettes!)
        The Art Room is one of the more complex spaces of the exhibition, and the only one in which Rone’s signature looming portraiture feels at all relevant. The room features several easels displaying a series of incomplete amateur sketches indicating that a life-drawing class has taken place. Here, women’s bodies are both consumed and produced. On a filing cabinet to the left of the entryway, under an artful quantity of dust, is a short article on Mary Magdalene. Above the blanketed dais at the center of the back wall is a portrait of Teresa Oman, Rone’s self-described muse, her hands clasped in holy benediction. She is obviously intended to resemble the Christian Mary, and this is obviously meant to stand in contrast with Mary Magdalene, but the contrast comes across as nothing more than a cheeky wink to critics of Rone’s unoriginal mural portraiture.
        It’s worth discussing the looming sad girl portraits. We didn’t want to, but it can’t be helped. The critique of this type of art is so old that it feels cliché to repeat it, but: this kind of portraiture reduces women to passive objects acted upon by men. This was articulated perfectly by John Berger in Ways of Seeing back in 1972: ‘men act, women are acted upon’. Leslie Thompson’s clumsy article a few months ago in Dispatch Review, in which she suggested that Rone’s portraits somehow transcend this critique, does nothing less than reinforce the importance of making that argument. These streaky visages, resembling the tragic DeviantArt offerings of the 2000s and 2010s, are the most unremarkable and uninteresting aspect of the work, and unfortunately it is this aspect that has been plastered all over billboards and buses.
        Frankly, these faces add little to nothing to the exhibition, as evidenced by the fact that they were rarely mentioned in the pages of the exhibition guest book we perused. One comment on the portraits immediately divigates:

‘Whose the same girl in the pictures drawn?

Is it his muse?

Should have more detailed information about the thoughts behind the rooms!’

Another:

‘Eerie. Haunting. Who is the girl and why is she there?’

Reading a few interviews with Rone clarifies just how shallow his approach is. In a 2023 interview with STIRworld he remarked on it quite transparently:

‘There's no particular story, and it's not a literal character portrait of Teresa Oman. She's more there in an emotional sense that draws stories out of people. I have created a total work of fiction... When people establish this emotional connection with the muse… they start to tell their own stories.’

And in a particularly banal interview with Julia Baird he described his goal as a ‘non-aggressive, non-sexual, beautiful image of an unknown woman’—at worst a completely anonymous, unthreatening, and passive receptacle for the dreams, desires, and memories of others, and at best a soothing feminine presence without a person behind it. Neither are particularly good options, and neither seem to have set alarm bells ringing among Australia’s docile literati.
        This serious shortcoming is difficult to reconcile with the exhibition’s successes. Is the Rone who treats women as window-dressing the same Rone who offers us intriguing and contradictory visions of their psyches through the show’s set-pieces? It isn’t clear on the face of the exhibition, dominated as it is by Rone branding, but TIME • RONE was brought to life by a team of 120 people. All of the period furniture, pressed metal, newspapers, and magazines had to be fabricated or sourced, a massive endeavour that took more than a year. Lead set designer Carly Spooner, speaking to Broadsheet, explained the process:

‘He’ll provide a creative brief and I’ll interpret it through objects and furnishings… With Time, I gathered lots of references for furniture from the 1950s. I chose the materials and how they needed to be painted, other collaborators built and painted a variety of objects… It’s a lot of collaborating with the team and then actually dressing the set.’

Set builder Callum Preston points out a similar process happening during the actual build, saying that ‘[w]e all have our own artistic practices on the side too… and all those skills come in handy working on a Rone project… Every aspect of the work is up for debate and everyone in the build team has a voice.’ Rone, the set design team, fabricators, and set builders succeed in peopling the fictive history of TIME • RONE with an aura of human presence, something which is only achievable by drawing on the wide range of experiences and ideas of a diverse and invested group of artists. The lived-in feel is the part of the show which is so beloved by its audience, and it is something that could only have been produced collectively.
        Not all of these collaborative elements are equally successful. While the set dressing excels, the same cannot be said for the score. Each work is accompanied by a bland post-minimalist, neo-romantic composition—an unfortunate genre of classical music kept artificially ventilated by its use in the film industry (think the tawdry strains of Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’). Nick Batterham’s underdeveloped and meandering pieces underestimate their audience, even if they were admirably performed by the Budapest Art Orchestra. The unusual use of surround sound (one speaker is embedded in a typewriter!) broke up the otherwise monotonous aural experience. The reliance of the lighting on musical cues led to much awkward squinting, though the overall effect was suitably moody, warm, and evocative.
        The final rooms, Backstage and The Library, are the most undercooked, both in terms of their density and thematic content. These are clear motions towards public spaces rather than workplaces or ateliers, but the works end up feeling like throwaway pieces addressed to thin notions: the romance of dimly lit jazz clubs and the opulence of old world libraries. The effect of the whole, however, remained undiminished by these elements.
        There is something interesting happening in the reception of TIME • RONE that has been smothered by its own pretensions, and by the Rone brand itself. In spite of this, the audience has been able to find its way to the elements of the exhibition which really matter—its magical, transportive effect, using the nostalgia it evokes as a bridge between generations rather than a shallow glorification of decay. During our visit we saw many families pass through the rooms, pointing out familiar or unfamiliar objects, laughing together, and connecting with each other. There is clearly a mass audience for this kind of immersive work that is at once approachable and artful, melancholy muses notwithstanding, in contrast to the endless parade of immersive multi-screen Van Gogh and Picasso exhibitions.
        Audiences are also drawing their own interesting conclusions from these works. One entry in the TIME • RONE guest book reads ‘It felt like a post-apocalyptic world and I had returned as a survivor to a world that is a snapshot in time’, another ‘Fallout vibes everywhere’, and another, perhaps most incisively, simply wrote ‘Made me think of war’. The cyclical dimming of lights in the different rooms evoked, for one of these reviewers, the power cuts in the lead up to aerial bombardments. For both of us the ubiquitous cobwebbing and dust in each of the rooms begged the question: where did all these people go? The Doomsday Clock, a project by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that measures the threat level of nuclear catastrophe, currently reads 90 seconds to midnight—closer to midnight than it was at the height of the Cold War. There’s a war in Ukraine, and heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East due to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Global expenditure on military technologies is at an historic high, and arms manufacturers are raking in massive profits. Now, with the election of Donald Trump, and his proposed cabinet of warhawks and christofascists, it is clear that things are only going to get worse.
        It comes as no surprise, then, that audiences have picked up on this theme, even if unconsciously. What might surprise many of those strolling through these retro-dystopian scenes is that AGWA has hosted at least one event, an evening affair for the US Consulate, sponsored by Bechtel, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris, and Northrup Grumman—the very weapons companies that threaten to bring about the world that this exhibition evokes.



TIME • RONE, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1 July 2024 – 2 February 2025.

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Artworks by Rone. Images courtesy of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

by Sam Beard.

an invitation to dance marks the ninth and final exhibition at Cool Change for 2024, accompanied by the concurrent loose ,, sparkling by Kelsey D. and Justine Walsh, which is nestled in a corner of the same gallery. an invitation to dance consists primarily of collaborative works by Jess Tan, Audrey Tan, Kristen Brownfield, jemi gale, and Clare Wohlnick. The gang of five share aesthetic sensibilities. This has resulted in a body of work that could very well be the vision of one individual, in terms of continuity. Among the most arresting works, if not for scale alone, is the hanging assemblage consisting of a central banner suspended by two ribbons hanging from either side. It is a collaboration between Brownfield, Wohlnick, and Audrey and Jess Tan consisting of stitching, weaving, collage, and found objects—a combination repeated throughout much of the exhibition. Across the room is another collaboration, a large expanse of wool mounted to the wall. Wriggly stitchwork and bits of organic matter are fixed to the surface. The sheet oscillates between appearing like a mouldy section of carpet and an earthy abstraction. 
        Nearby to the woollen work are two suspended sheets or tarpaulin with painterly swathes on either side. Suspended with twigs, bark and plant matter, they remind me of messy painter’s aprons. On closer inspection, there are elements of painting that are reminiscent of Joan Mitchell’s later paintings—though perhaps this is a stretch, as the occasional foray into figuration (and somewhat strained figuration at that) dismantles the flowy, painterly forms that constitute the most interesting parts of these works. Nearby, Brownfield and Audrey Tan display a selection of minute found objects. Pinned to the wall, these objects include plant matter, a scrunched up scrap of aluminum foil, a dead moth, bits of plastic, etc. Unfortunately, these tiny remnants are simply too diminutive to stand out from their jerry-rigged display and fade into obscurity amongst the larger, more bombastic works.
        Of most interest to me are the suspended mobiles by Audrey and Jess Tan.  Like a hippy Alexander Calder, these cloudy, pastel, lumpy mobiles softly move in the dead air of the gallery. A mix of wonky copper wire, puffy pillow-like forms, and grotty bits of what appears to be seaweed, they are intriguing assemblages that remain somewhat unresolved. One has the feeling that these are the prototypes for further work—“process” yet to be undertaken. This brings me to the curatorial premise: the ‘privileg[ing] process-led art practices’ and ‘minimising emphasis on extractive value and outcome’. In the absence of ‘outcome’ is the presence of ‘pottering’—or what the curators described as the ‘embodied but unfocused thinking and working that playfully engages with and reassembles matter’. What strikes me about this definition of pottering, is how familiar it is, or, put differently, how often artists of all disciplines attempt to describe these moments of uncontrived contemplation. These moments underpin creativity, and are increasingly described as “under attack”, be it from social media, 24-hour news cycles, waning attention—you’ve heard it all before. For artists, or anyone undertaking a creative endeavour, time spent pondering, reflecting, mulling over, or however one chooses to describe it, is crucial.
        Yet, what seems confused in the premise for this exhibition and in its privileging of the ‘process-led’ is that, ultimately, it is the results, or remnants, of these “processes” that we, the viewers, are left to contemplate—and not the process itself that is being “privileged.” This leaves one to ask, is this not almost always the case? So, from the initial premise, couched in the language of creative radicality, we return to a rather traditional end result. an invitation to dance presents the work of a group of artists who represent an increasingly distinct contemporary aesthetic ‘current’ (to borrow from Terry Smith). It is a current that has been less generously described as the “sticks and stones” trend but more generously as eco-critically minded. However, eco-critical does not fully encompass the particular sensibilities of these artists, who favour a mix of pastel colours, found objects, playfulness (or a lack of seriousness, depending on one’s perspective), whimsical and naïve drawing, weaving, stitching, all seasoned with a sense of spiritualism.
        My curiosity about the curatorial remarks was piqued because they (re)present what most artists tend to do as something new, different, or divergent; an attempt at transforming the norm into the new. Most artists (those who really think through or take seriously their work) create in the way described by the artists here. One example that comes to mind is the exhibition at Nyisztor Studio, Materialogic, held last year, which included recent works by Juriek Wybranic, Trevor Richards, and, of relevance to this conversation, Alex Spremberg’s cardboard sculptures. These three artists showed a particular fascination for found or repurposed materials, as many have throughout the history of modern art. Spremberg is relevant here for his intention to create large scale sculpture with a light environment footprint by using packaging and cardboard—certainly a motive and concern shared by the artists of an invitation to dance. Is the “process-led” the real differentiating factor between these creative endeavours? Or, instead, is the difference aesthetic? (The hard-edged versus the hippy?) Surely, ‘process-led’ is simply a way of signalling that it is not the “output” we should be appreciating. However, this is a hard task when it is only the output that remains in the gallery for the viewer to appreciate.
        Closing off the year for Cool Change, an invitation to dance and loose ,, sparkling act as a concluding statement for the arts organisation, which this year has—more often than not—favoured presenting works-in-progress and unresolved experimentation rather than fully realised exhibitions. Beginning 2024 with Tom Roger’s 4Spells and Guesting and Hosting, a collection of works by Lithuanian artists curated by Sophie Durand, both at FORM, Cool Change soon took up a partnership with PS Art Space. This partnership resulted in: a series of works in progress by Ilona McGuire; 1948: Palestine in Pictures curated by Zaid Snobar and Saskia Willinge; Andrea Meacham’s wonky sculptures in Tear Jerker, paired with a fascinating selection of videos curated by Cassandra Tytler and Andrea Rassell (which was ultimately held at Artsource after a last minute change); and to hold a space for the body to give Shan Dante, paired with Makaela Rowe-Fox’s single-channel video, Actional Attempt. Nearly two years on from establishing a new space at the King’s Complex building, I remain hard pressed to understand why Cool Change has not fully utilised their own venue for exhibitions. Instead, “takeovers” of fellow galleries have constituted the bulk of Cool Change’s programming. While the King’s Complex location comes with myriad complexities of its own, it is also an undeniably and wonderfully absurd venue—rich with potential for anyone thinking outside the box and eager to do something unorthodox and fun.
        Overall, one leaves an invitation to dance with the sense that this exhibition was more fun to create than to see—perhaps this is the salient feature of the “process-led.”


an invitation to dance is presented by Cool Change and hosted by PS Art Spac, and runs 23 November – 21 December 2024.

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Image credit: Artworks by Kristen Brownfield, jemi gale, Audrey Tan, Jess Tan, and Clare Wohlnick, at PS Art Space. Photographed by the author.