The annual ranking of the most influential people in West Australia’s art world, according to Dispatch Review.

Dan Bourke, Keywords, AVA

by Francis Russell.

When we come to say ‘we just don’t speak the same language’ we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. 

A quick review of the strategic human resource management literature on organisational values will reveal that a clear values statement is necessary in order to attract employees who will align with an organisation’s mission, attract customers who want to purchase an ethos as much as a product or service, to successfully guide the behaviour of employees, and to increase an organisation’s chances of successfully achieving its overall strategic goals.
        Underpinning this literature is the assumption that organisations owe a duty of service to society as a whole and not just to owners, shareholders, or a select group of stakeholders; in other words, discussions of organisational values must be understood within the broader discourse of corporate citizenship and the related notion that organisational culture can play a key role in the development and achievement of progressive political goals. As such, organisational values should not be reduced to simple branding or marketing exercises.[1] Instead, the development of an organisation’s values is part of subject formation—the production of modes of conduct that make an employee’s fidelity to their employer paradigmatic for evincing one’s trustworthiness and value in society. Indeed, the very name “strategic human resource management” is not just an example of terminological inflation, but creates a distinction between an older human resource management that functioned to ensure industrial compliance, reactively provided services related to team functionality and wellbeing, and ensured the smooth operation of key services like payroll, and a new kind of human resource management that concerns itself with proactively moulding an organisation and its employees in order to ensure that both live up to the expectations of a dutiful corporate citizen.
        However, and as has been shown by recent texts like Working for the Brand: How Corporations are Destroying Free Speech by labour relations lawyer Josh Bornstein, the reality of such interventions into worker subjectivity are much more disquieting. Putting to one side the lofty and abstract goals of corporations and large not-for-profits like universities and art galleries and museums, codes of conduct and organisational value charters are more tangibly used to silence and terminate staff for challenging managerial prerogative, contacting the media about corporate actions that would seem to violate an organisation’s commitment to good citizenship, and even for daring to express political opinions in one’s private life (and especially on social media). Bizarrely, and despite adopting organisational values that should make bad behaviour rare, Australian organisations regularly get into the press and the courts and tribunals for illegally sacking workers, committing hundreds of millions of dollars of wage theft, sham contracting, and exposing workers to life threatening conditions. As such, the development of and commitment to organisational values have become, at best, a sign of conformity and compliance with neoliberal capitalism and, at worst, a symptom of an over-identification with symbols that mask a fundamental absence of values, if not a kind of nihilism. In this way, the contemporary corporation or not-for-profit acts like the political conservative who becomes increasingly obsessed with symbols like flags and national anthems as the very democracy and nation state they claim to valorise is reduced to a handmaiden for the market.
        Keywords, a new exhibition by Dan Bourke at the recently rebranded AVA Gallery (formerly Sweet Pea) explores this aforementioned subject formation primarily through a series of suspended assemblage works combining second-hand soft toys and laser cut acrylic text. Somewhere between a butcher shop’s display of hanging meat and the bunting you might find at a child’s birthday party, each work displays stuffed toys shackled to vertically aligned text that spells out key values taken from leading Australian art organisations: integrity, diversity, ambitious, experimental, challenging, critical, responsive, collaborative, sustainable. In many ways, Keywords is an extension of Bourke’s sustained examination of the contradictions and perversities inherent to the professionalisation and commodification of the counterculture and the becoming-counter-cultural of the corporation and major institution—interrelated concerns that have underpinned well over a decade of compelling work. While Keywords could be seen as another example of contemporary art that explores the failure of art institutions to live up to their progressive values, Keywords is refreshingly generative in its attention to the specific libidinal and aesthetic dimensions of the subject formation I’ve discussed earlier in this review. Beyond mere condemnation, the materiality of the works in Keywords goes beyond the usual accusations of hypocrisy, elitism, or complicity to explore cuteness and flatness as central to the specific kind of alienation and reification one encounters in today’s knowledge economy. Indeed, as Tara Heffernan writes in the show’s catalogue essay,

Bourke’s use of toys also speaks to the infantilisation of the white-collar worker in contemporary managerial practices. As well as the excessive focus on team-building activities, think of the well-worn cliché of bosses treating their team like family—a cliché reinforced by sitcoms that focus on the social dynamics that develop between office mates. The fuzzy veneer of safety and care—and performative concerns with the environment, respect and diversity—conceal the malevolence of bureaucracies that, in reality, are primarily concerned with protecting their own interests.

This is perhaps where Bourke’s intervention is more thought provoking than conventional critiques of the corporatised art institution that focus only on its bureaucratic and elitist features. Rather than merely offering the contemporary worker an opportunity to perform the role of an aggregated and sanitised worker drone, the knowledge economy demands that one bring their full self to work, that they embody their work through a set of values that are lived day-to-day, and that they understand their place within the organisation as being part of a politically and socially powerful mission. All of which has been well-understood by artists and critics for some time—and has been argued compellingly, if not definitively, in texts like Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism—but what is less remarked upon is how cartoonish and flattened one’s self must become in order to be accepted at work. It is here, by way of identifying the contemporary knowledge economy worker with the figure of the Care Bear or Beanie Baby, that Keywords helps to reveal the combined aesthetics of cuteness and flatness that have come to form one of the key vectors of today’s power relations. As Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, authors of Cute Accelerationism, note

the dehumanizing vector in culture is no longer Terminator. Right now, it’s dollification [...] We are gradually coming to perceive even ourselves through the filters, algorithms, and two-dimensional space through which we relate to the rest of the world. All of the qualities that involves—flatness, plasticity, virality—find an acute locus within the culture of cuteness.[2]

We should not let this drive to infantilization, this injunction for the contemporary knowledge worker to consent to being squished and squeezed into a cute and flat form, fool us into believing that, beyond the subordinated status of the employee, there exists an opposed or adult world of management. Such a distinction does not operate at the level of a spatial hierarchy between those at the top and at the bottom of the greasy pole, but, instead, functions temporally. For most of our working lives we are forced to negotiate dynamisms and complexities inherent to the labour process, pluralistic situations that requires us to confront a multitude of correct and incorrect ways to respond and be responsible. At any moment, however, the contradictions, ambivalences, and double binds of industrial and political life can become flattened by management into a cartoonish world of heroes and villains, integrity and dishonesty, and excellence and mediocrity. Indeed, part of what can make corporate value statements almost totalitarian is the impossibility of fulfilling them; the quasi-utopian moral world imagined by corporate values requires one to be unobservant as a matter of practical necessity, which entails that, on judgement day, everyone becomes a sinner undeserving of redemption. As such, the contemporary knowledge worker increasingly witnesses, if not experiences directly, the nightmarish surreality of vague-to-the-point-of-empty values such as courage or respect becoming weaponised to crush worker opposition to managerial power or to eliminate an individual who has fallen out of favour with their superiors.
        Just like a children’s television programme that appears surprisingly sinister and unsettling when rewatched as an adult, what organisational theorist Robert Cooper called “organisational kitsch” functions, like all kitsch, to render those aspects of work that are disturbing ‘into something that is pleasing and pacifying.’[3] As Cooper argued, kitsch ‘oozes its way through those ‘theories’ of man-management we call the Human Relations school’. In particular, Cooper outlines three forms of human relations kitsch: firstly, the notion that industrialisation has separated humanity from an organic community it needs to be reunited with (with human resources playing a key role); secondly, that workplaces regularly fall into antagonisms that could be avoided with the right kind of intervention (as opposed to being the product of the class stratifications of capitalism as such); and, lastly, that a properly functioning organisation can assist to build a properly functioning society—or, that a properly functioning society is nothing other than properly functioning organisations—which, as Cooper states, is ‘kitschic because a management problem is kitschified into (and thus made more acceptable) a human and social problem.’
        Rather than being a phase we can hope to grow out of, the cute but increasingly frayed sculptural elements that comprise Keywords challenge us to take cuteness, flatness, and banality seriously as entrenched logics of power. As anyone who has paid attention to the dismal political failure of the Democrats in the United States will know, the libidinal economy of organisational kitsch cannot be successfully opposed by calls to finally take things seriously; as if a new-new sincerity could marshal a coalition of the alienated against the ascendant alliance of banality and terror. Indeed, and as Keywords helps to show, the unrelenting demand to take things seriously—especially our signature values—is fundamental to organisational kitsch. Moreover, before lambasting others for being childish and unserious we must first interrogate what a serious political project opposed to capitalism and fascism would look like, and consider to what extent this aforementioned flattening is in part a symptom of a crisis of confidence; a kind of defensive maneuverer in which an organisation or individual makes themselves into a small target for fear of being attacked. Nevertheless, and in the wake of a decade of corporate Memphis cloaked immiseration and far-right Studio Ghiblified AI slop, shouldn’t we also be suspicious of the notion, promulgated by influential contemporary theorists like McKenzie Wark, that cuteness might be ‘what the fascist revivalists fear most’?[4]

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Footnotes:

1. This is not to say that there is no relationship between value statements and branding, and, indeed, while the homogeneity and repetitiveness of organisational values—integrity, respect, transparency, excellence, inclusion, etc.—might lead one to think that such value charters have only made organisations indistinguishable from one another this to potentially miss the point—particularly for medium sized organisations, the adoption of seemingly generic values presents a reassuring brand identity to stakeholders: “trust us to conform!” 

2. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism

3. https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/23.3%20Cooper%20Organisational%20Kitsch.pdf

4. https://www.frieze.com/article/mckenzie-wark-politics-cuteness-246

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Photography by Lyle Branson. Courtesy the artist and AVA, Boorloo/Perth.

Revivification at AGWA

by Angus Bowskill.

Revivification is the latest experimental exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, featuring a particularly unusual central work—a brain grown in a lab. Predominantly, the exhibition is a sound-based collaborative installation by artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Gingold and neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts. Revivification revolves around the "in-vitro brain" of late composer Alvin Lucier, who passed in 2021. This external brain was grown from converting a blood sample from Lucier, provided before his death into stem cells. These stem cells were then altered further to become cerebral organoids, which are ‘three-dimensional structures that resemble a developing human brain’ [1]. This brain is then connected via computer technology to twenty curved brass plates that respond to the neural activity in the brain to generate sound. When the brain signals pulse, the brass plates are struck, activating a cacophony of strange and beautiful sounds. The themes of Revivification are those of immortalisation, biological agency and the intersection between art and science. Alvin Lucier’s career as a composer was experimental and this exhibition acts as a posthumous extension of that career. Lucier was known for performances where he would wear EEG electrodes to translate his brain activity to live instruments. Revivification can be seen as a stripping away to the essentials of what made those performances so intriguing, instruments relaying brain activity into sound in real time. To tease out some key themes of Revivification, I will be looking at Daisy Dunn’s ‘The strange death of the art school’ (2021) alongside perspectives from New Materialist theory to explore the material approach of Revivification and the themes of agency present within the work.
        Daisy Dunn’s ‘The strange death of the art school’ investigates the shift from experimentation and practice-led research within art schools to a more institutionalised curriculum focused on written assessments and over justification of bland conceptual art, all of which due to the institutional evolution from ‘art school’ to a more formal university status. [2] Dunn critiques the relatively recently achieved university status of art schools by stating that the shift has made art school about producing those who can contribute economically after completing their degree. This creates a cycle of teaching that encourages young artists to impersonate already successful artists, such as Dunn’s example of the Young British Artists. These changes are also a result of continuous funding cuts from arts education, which make it harder for art schools to justify investing into projects without guaranteed financial benefit. As a result, Dunn argues that the art school upon gaining university status has become less about pushing artistic boundaries, and instead about producing artists fluent in faux-academic justifications for art making, with little room for experimentation or genuine creative risk-taking. However, Revivification stands in direct opposition to many critiques made by Dunn. Experimentation and process-based exploration are key to this exhibition. The artists’ privilege process and materiality throughout the making and exhibiting of the work, a trait that Dunn suggests is lost in contemporary art education. Revivification suggests that there are still spaces in which art can emerge through curiosity despite institutional and economic pressures to produce work that is valuable.
        This drive for ingenuity on behalf of the artists could be because of the artists’ connection to SymbioticA. Many, if not all, the artists that worked on Revivification are currently or have previously worked as a part of SymbioticA. SymbioticA is the world’s first bio arts laboratory, pioneering the intersection between art, science and technology. Revivification lives in this intersection, using living matter as a material in the work. Their work is a clear reflection of the institute’s ethos of material experimentation and ethical inquiry. Prior to 2024 SymbioticA offered a space for projects such as Revivification to take place, providing support for a niche industry within a broader art context. Throughout the 2020s SymbioticA has struggled with a lack of institutional funding and was slated to close in June of 2024. However, information regarding the closure remains unclear and no updates have been publicly provided by UWA or SymbioticA. Regardless, the institution has been faced with severe budget cuts from UWA, who have stated the reason to be to prioritise core teaching and research areas [3]. Although Revivification resists the pressures that led to SymbioticA’s decline, its existence within Western Australia’s state art gallery suggests that bio art is worth supporting and a reminder of the need for experimental institutions like SymbioticA.
        Revivification can also be seen through a New Materialist perspective via the use of live materials, such as the brain organoid central to the exhibition. New Materialism is a theoretical approach to the world that rethinks the relationship between matter and humans, questioning the idea that humans are the only beings with agency [4]. It emphasises the role of agency in art making, suggesting a way of working where the artist is not dictating the materials, but rather is in co-collaboration with them. This idea of co-collaboration between maker and materials is in opposition to the early Enlightenment’s anthropocentric view of the world, a view that sees humans as the only beings with agency and those who shape the world [5]. New materialism calls for a shift towards process rather than pre-defined outcomes, a sentiment also present in Barbara Bolt’s Practise as Research (2010). In this book, Bolt argues that knowledge emerges in art making through materials, time and process. Bolt introduces the concept of ‘material thinking’—a theory in which material is not simply passive matter waiting to be acted upon by a being with agency (a human), but rather a participant in the production of knowledge [6]. These New Materialist perspectives offer a new framework in which Revivification can be viewed through. At the core of this exhibition is the brain organoid, a living material that has agency over the sounds emanating from the brass plates surrounding the viewer. The artists engage with these materials as collaborators, providing a framework from which the brain grows and produces sound based on the signals being emitted. Unpredictability is embraced in this show; rather than providing a set composition, the brain organoid has agency over the sounds being made. Revivification aligns with New Materialist thought, due to the artists providing an opportunity for materials to have agency over the work. The exhibition stands in contrast to others, where traditional exhibition outcomes are controlled and rehearsed. Here, outcomes are able to emerge unpredictably. The work in Revivification is never fixed; it is living and changing constantly, shifting throughout the process of making. It offers a rare experience for viewers in a traditional gallery space, one shaped by the behaviour of a living organism rather than the artist. In this, the exhibition exemplifies the kind of thinking that Bolt deems as New Materialist.
        When arriving at AGWA, Revivification hardly makes its presence known. Instead of a large inviting doorway like typical AGWA exhibitions, viewers enter through dark and narrow tunnel made from felt soundproofing material, ensuring that all sound is trapped inside. When your eyes adjust and navigate the curvature of the exhibition space, you are surrounded by brass plates lining the walls. Walking further in, the sound produced by the brass plates seems to follow you, luring you into the back of the tunnel where the brain is staged. The brass box that houses the brain has an opening for viewers to peer through, and note the organoid is small, no bigger than a fifty-cent coin. Against the back wall are seats where viewers can sit while listening to the sounds being made. When first visiting this exhibition, I felt as if the composer was trying to escape the confines of his petri dish, banging on the brass plates like jail bars. However, when visiting again I appreciated the beauty in listening to these different and at some points awkward noises coming from such ornate brass plates that could be sculptural objects displayed alone in a different exhibition. The brain was shaping my experience, making noises that were unpredictable but interesting in that skill. It prompts viewers to question the consciousness of the brain organoid—if the brain is still growing and learning, at what point does it know what it is doing? Could it learn from the sounds being made by itself? Revivification offers a unique experience for the visitor, one that suggests death is not the end of creativity.
        This exhibition highlights the importance of supporting the bio art industry, due to the distinctive outcomes that shows of this depth can produce. Revivification can be seen as an extension of New Materialist thought. We see this in the choice to work with live materials as collaborators, where emphasis is placed on the materials that control the show. The exhibition demonstrates what possibilities can emerge from a creative practice that deviates from traditional institutional structures of art making, and the crucial need to fund alternative institutions like SymbioticA. It chooses to prioritise experimentation and process rather than predictability and justification. The result is a singular experience within an institution of AGWA’s stature, successfully creating a space for emotional response and ethical questions. Revivification is a compelling example of how risk-taking, material-led art can still happen in mainstream galleries such as AGWA.

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Footnotes:

1. Art Gallery of Western Australia. 2025. "Revivification." AGWA. https://artgallery.wa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/revivification/

2. Dunn, Daisy. 2021. ‘The strange death of the art school.’ Engelsberg Ideas. https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-strange-death-of-the-art-school/.

3. Amant, Alisyn. 2023. ‘Bio Artists Face an Uncertain Future.’ Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/862162/bio-artists-face-an-uncertain-future/

4. Bolt, Barbara. 2013. Carnal knowledge: Towards a ‘new materialism’ through the arts. 1st ed. London England: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

5. Ibid.

6. Bolt, Barbara. 2010. Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry. 1st ed. London England: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

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Images of Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, courtesy of the arts and AGWA.

The Australian Dream and other Fictions: Andy Quilty’s Happy Meals & Scooter Skids: Art from the outer suburbs at FORM Gallery

by Jess van Heerden.

Andy Quilty is not into frills. Happy Meals & Scooter Skids: Art from the outer suburbs takes pride in its resolved rawness. It cuts through the C.R.AP. (classism, righteousness, and anti-pluralism) that has a tendency to haunt the scene we know and love. Yet, there is no sign of the toxic masculinity that such violently grounded, formally focused work frequently harbours. Instead, we see worries, triumphs, wishes, and walks home beaming from white cube walls in tongue-in-cheek earnestness. The Perth Festival project represents a collaboration between prolific so-called Western Australian artist and educator Andy Quilty and students from three of Boorloo’s outer suburban schools, Youth Futures Community School Midland, Armadale Senior High School, and Warnbro Community High School. The FORM exhibition runs alongside its counterpart at Midland Junction Arts Centre and will later tour to the Kim Fletcher Gallery in Armadale, finally ending its run in Rockingham (where Quilty is based and has lived all his life).
        Quilty’s three solo works, Car Crash (“I’m gonna call Howard Sattler”) (Safety Bay Rd), Flag Man (Frangipanis) (Axminister St), and Surf Bogan (Shark Chopper get F***ed) (Palermo Cove) are a mesmerising force. Clashing elements sit at odds to create densely layered chaos. Surf Bogan, for example, is something like a warped vignette with its careful ink shading pressing inwards from the upper right and bottom left-hand corners. Yet this gradient frame cannot contain the formal and tonal explosions that undermine the paper’s rectangular frame. This work is more portal than page. Expressive, directional linework instils the fidgety figures with movement and life. The varied marks and dense layering that renders the ambiguous subject matter, creates the impression that it cannot hold still. Scratched markings give the impression that the subject matter is uncertain in its person or objecthood, as if the disembodied screaming mouth, laser-shooting eyes, and raised middle finger only rest briefly in formation and could flicker quickly back into unrecognisable abstraction. The triad of improvised drypoint scratchings reflects what Quilty refers to as ‘outer suburban archetypes’, critical of lingering stigmatisation that outer suburban experience frequently encounters. Exhibition text explains that Flag Man and Surf Bogan describe persons the artist passed when driving to the beach. The third drypoint, Car Crash, emerges in response to  an informative experience for Quilty. A single-vehicle crash tragically killed his teenage friend—incorrectly reported in the news as a stolen vehicle in accordance with negative assumptions frequently made about outer suburban youth. Quilty explains that while working as a labourer after finishing high school, his boss (who was aware of Quilty’s close friendship with the deceased) told him casually that he attended the crash as a volunteer firefighter and his friend’s body was split in half. The artist recalls ‘that he so nonchalantly shared this with me, indicated the frequency with which he attended these scenes and implied the notion that I have come across in outer suburbia: that your feelings can go and get f***ed.’ 
        Quilty’s mundane, suburban subject matter—with works featuring metamorphosed sneakers, Quicksilver-esque designs, crucifixes, eyes, knees, mechanical parts, and waves—offers points of departure from which sets of encoded beliefs are unravelled. It is evident that Quilty has likewise encouraged students to do the same, drawing from their day-to-day experiences and trials to inform their artmaking. Visualising daily experiences—without dressing them up for viewers—is an impulse throughout the exhibition. Works feature scattered assortments of popular cartoons, barking dogs, and fast-food products in a manner that mimics the meandering jumping of conversations between close friends. Like exchanges that occur within intimate friendships, works range from addressing pressing fears—like looming financial pressures, living up to a family member’s expectations, and the drive to make sense of oneself – to trivial toss-ups like what the change in your back pocket will get you for dinner. Also apparent throughout the exhibition is the influence of the experimentalism with which Quilty approaches mark-making. Quilty’s skill as an artist is matched by his capacity to inspire and guide as an educator. The most informative class I took during my undergraduate degree was Quilty’s Drawing Foundations. Whether peppering A2 sheets with staccato, easel-rocking pencil jabs, turning the pencil around to its but and producing blunt, red-tainted impressions, or taking up the neon pastel just handed to him by a volunteer and slashing across a delicately shaded biro portrait (to a chorus of sharp, auditable gasps), his passion for the mark was infectious. It is clear in Happy Meals and Scooter Skids that the same fever has taken hold. Each work contains evidence of unique assemblages of delicately twisting wrists, careful blocking-out, haphazard rubbing, slow shading, tessellating pressure, and decisive linework.
        Kaden’s Police, the first work to greet visitors, is a graphite and gouache monotype print on Fabriano paper. It contains a carefully rendered police van, complete with dark hubcaps, tinted windows, and the tell-tale checkered stripe. Yet the law-and-orderly scene is inverted in two fell swoops. Confident curves—perhaps traces of a side-held pencil or a blunt plastic item—mimic burnouts’ inconsistent scorch mark remanence. Combined with the van’s positioning in the upper third of the page, this clever variation gives the probably stolen car a burst of explosive movement. Untitled, Precious, Kyle, Chase, and Ashton’s collaborative ink monotype and drypoint print from found cardboard on paper, adopts a different approach altogether. The 84 x 59.5 cm page encloses several distinct prints that clash and harmonise in turn to create an unpredictable synthesis of implied textures. The image celebrates imperfection to indicate the past lives of the recycled material employed in the print’s making. Clearly rendered in ink, the imprint of torn paper at the centre and bottom left of the work leaves a particularly striking gradient beside jet-black ink blocks. In the prints that make up the right section of the work, carefully sketched figurative drawings tumble into abstraction through layers of interlocking linework. The experimentation continues with a series of five recycled McDonalds packaging monoprints. Rima’s Medium Fries, for example, is an ink monotype that interrupts the smooth surface of McDonald’s packaging with soft, wiggly swirls, boldly skeltered linework, and assertive fingerprints. Medium Fries sits adjacent to Kaden’s quartet of oil marker and solvent transfer on Fabriano paper, LAW and ORDER, HOME OWNER, PATROLE, and INSURANCE. Kaden, whose family Rottweiler is coincidently walked past Andy’s house most days, has created a series of striking portraits. Minimal linework and shading suggest the curves of noses, cheekbones, and tightly sealed lips or downcast eyes. Each expressive face is superimposed over images that might be grouped as outer suburban iconography, including an aging Ford, a police car, and a single-story, tree-less property with a neatly kept lawn.
        A group show featuring collaborative and individual works by teenage high school students is fated to contain some variance. Remarkably, however, not a single work of the forty-five selected contains homogenous mark-making. Artistic inventiveness and creative approaches make each work an interesting and sophisticated formal investigation. This implicit playfulness should not be taken to suggest, however, that the content is not taken seriously by Quilty or the student artists. While often depicted cheekily, students’ day-to-day experiences are not dismissed as insignificant or ridiculed in a The Castle-esque manner of quasi-sincerity (to draw from Quilty’s analysis of the popular film in his masters thesis). This is felt in the pointed sense of ‘outside-in’ that characterises the exhibition, a sensation that is far from coincidental. Although holding their own as formally innovative fine art objects, it feels as if these works have been brought into the gallery space upon relocation from alternative environments, ‘out there’, to which they belong. Quilty and Andrew Nicholls’ (who worked on the show as supporting curator) use of crude construction materials to hang works further encourages one to notice the disparity between the mundane, sometimes gritty realities of outer suburban kids and the imagery that typically graces gallery walls. Is it not a curious conditionality that allows many so-called Australian gallery goers to cling to a supposedly collective (highly problematic) hills hoist heritage, yet find themselves surprised to meet such down-to-earth subject matter in a gallery context? This irony is not lost on Quilty.
        Beneath the exhibition’s laid-back façade is an examination of lingering prejudice, so fittingly placed in Claremont, the beating heart of Perth’s upper classes. Quilty’s project reminds art viewers of the often-unspoken class boundaries we like to think have been dissolved. Happy Meals & Scooter Skids is a mark-making masterclass, but equally, beneath the fun and games, addresses patterns of exclusion within art world mechanisms. It asks, more simply, who is actually welcome.

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Image credits:

1.  Andy Quilty and Armadale Senior High School Students, Nike flowers and shopping trolley (detail), 2024, drypoint print on Fabriano paper, 76 x 56 cm. 
2. Courtesy of FORM Gallery.
3.  Chase, Kyle and Precious, Youth Futures Community School Midland, Untitled (detail), 2024, Ink monotype and drypoint print from found cardboard on paper, 84 x 59.5 cm.

by Sam Beard.

Yesterday evening, Vessel Contemporary launched its much-anticipated inaugural program. ‘At Vessel, we boldly dedicate ourselves as the future,’ announced Will Ek Uvelius and Nina Juniper, the executive board directors of Vessel Contemporary. ‘Our mission is to fill a missing gap in Western Australia by providing a non-profit arts organisation with a unique independent voice and dedicated exhibition space.’ This is a bold statement, and one that has had many speculating whether Vessel may very well be positioning itself as Fremantle’s answer to PICA.
        In the months leading up to the program launch, Vessel has been sharing similarly emphatic statements, along with board member profiles, through its social media channels. Given the many “gaps” within the Perth artworld, and the bold phrasing of Vessel’s announcements, one could not help but speculate on the then-forthcoming program: how might Vessel support early career artists? Perhaps with a comprehensive education program? Act as an alternative to university art schools? Deliver a robust series of lectures and workshops? Present a full exhibition program?
        The official announcement included five projects in all: the much-rumoured exhibition by Gian Manik; the inaugural eight-week paid artist-in-residence program, awarded to Amanda Bell; a documentary film screening series with the Montreal-based non-profit Cinema Politica; an exhibition as part of the Fremantle Biennale in November (details to be announced); and an experimental workshop series provided by Landing Thoughts (find out more here: https://landingthoughts.com), which ‘[t]hrough mutual learning, material investigations and conversation [...] examines what it is to land delicate thoughts in language.’ Two of the three artists behind Landing Thoughts, Kate and Magni Moss, have run comparable workshops in the past at PICA. Similarly, Manik was selected as the 2024 PICA Editions artist, and Amanda Bell received the 2025 Judy Wheeler Commission, also at PICA. While it is certainly exciting to see more workshops, exhibitions, and residencies (particularly paid ones) occurring in WA, perhaps the “gap” which comes to mind is not an “absence”, as proposed in Vessel’s marketing, but the distance between their ambitious statements and the modest program.
        To deliver this program, funds are required. At the launch, the Vessel execs gave special mention to their aim of raising $1 million in donations by 2030. This is a rather ambitious goal for a start-up arts organisation that has just gone public. However, Vessel is nearly 56% of the way there, thanks to a major financial contribution from inaugural board director, Adam Jorlen. What is unusual about the $500,000 donation is that it is entirely in cryptocurrency. This may ring alarm bells for some, given the fluctuating nature of crypto. Yet, Jorlen is a futurist with a penchant for startups, and his interests in crypto and blockchain are not unrelated to The Naval Store, which also houses Enkel Collective.
        Jorlen is the co-founder of Enkel Collective, which has two main activities: running The Naval Store, and ‘auspicing and supporting individuals and organisations involved in changemaking activities.’ Clicking through the Collective’s website, one can explore a variety of past projects including ‘thinking workshops,’ ‘sector discussions,’ ‘study groups,’ ‘ideas accelerator’ sessions—the bread-and-butter of the mid-2010s ‘makerspace.’ Furthermore, Jorlen is the co-founder of the newly announced Arrival music festival, which will also be taking place largely at The Naval Store. With these three endeavours, Enkel, Vessel and Arrival, orbiting around The Naval Store, it is easy to become confused by their relationship with one another. So, to recap:

• The Naval Store is just the building, has a neutral brand, is open to community use, and is under a 20-year lease from the City of Fremantle.
• The Enkel Collective is the leaseholder and manage The Naval Store with the purpose of “activating” it.
• Vessel Contemporary is an “arts organisation” that will present an annual program at The Naval Store (which will also continue to operate as it has, more or less, for the past decade).

In other words, Vessel is not quite an “arts organisation” in the traditional sense (a standalone bricks-and-mortar gallery). Nor is Vessel a rebrand of The Naval Store. Instead, Vessel appears consistent with a trend of “gallery takeovers” that have been occurring across local arts organisations. For example, the “Cool Change Presents” exhibitions at PS Art Space and Artsource. This trend of Russian doll galleries and organisations, who cohabit within one larger location, is perhaps most easily explained by the scarcity of affordable real estate—the lifeblood of art galleries, particularly those where commercial activities are a secondary concern. Under these conditions, the makerspace provides hyper-flexibility and, in turn, security. For arts organisations in these share-house situations, branding is crucial for clearly delineating between the activities of one another. Perhaps this, in part, explains the empathic claims made during the program launch.
        Ultimately, this program appears to be a tidy, focused presentation that prioritises community activities and offers paid opportunities to artists. Certainly a delight to see! But hardly revolutionary. Which is precisely what has me scratching my head: the dissonance between Vessel’s modest program, which seems so familiar, and the “gap” referred to by Vessel. If this presumed lacuna can be better articulated—at the very least, so as not to appear to dismiss the equivalent efforts of other independently run arts organisations in Perth, however mighty or modest—then Vessel may well hold a stronger position. But for now, in keeping with its name, Vessel remains empty. Only time, and a few exhibitions, will tell if indeed WA’s artworld future has arrived.