Missed Shows and Mini Reviews 

by Darren Jorgensen, Riley Landau, Amelia Birch, and Sam Beard. 

The following are a mix of mini reviews rejected from publication in the 2025 issue of Memo Magazine. They are also exhibitions that missed a longform review in Dispatch during 2024-25.


Polarity: Fire and Ice
Tim Georgeson, Maureen Gruben, Cass Lynch, Mei Swan Lim, Adam Sebire, Indigenous Desert Alliance.
Fremantle Arts Centre, 10 February – 28 April 2024.

The ice was much better than the fire in this exhibition of First Nations responses to climate change. The fire was the usual kind of video work that follows Aboriginal people around with high-definition equipment and an ethnographic romanticism. We’ve seen it all before. Some firestick farming, some burning trees, abandoned cars and the laying of Aboriginal hands onto bark as if they are healing the Earth from the ravages of colonisation. It’s ABC TV for the art gallery, and in Fremantle there’s a reliable rent-a-crowd of white sannyasin children tip toeing around in ethical footwear to keep the attendance numbers flowing. The rhetoric around the show felt all the heavier after the driest summer in the south-west, killing ancient trees, and this may have been why the four-channel video work AnthropoScene VII: Sikujumaataarpoq (2023) showing Greenland’s ice fields was so effective. Adam Sebire’s meditation filmed by drone named all the different kinds of ice the Greenlanders have put a name to. Sikuiuitsoq: sea always covered by ice. Maniillat: uneven, pack ice. And so on. I watched it three times, missing my friend’s reggae band, just to feel like there was somewhere coldly different out there, somewhere beyond Australia with its dying forests and the stifling, ineffectual politics around imagining what a different, post-climate change or post-Aboriginal culture might look like.
Oui Move In You
Laure Prouvost.
Pert Institute of Contemporary Art / Perth Festival, 7 February – 30 March 2025.

Oui Move in You saw award-winning French artist Laura Prouvost present a range of video and installation works throughout PICA. Across these works, Prouvost explored the relationship between female bodies, connection and generational transformation. Visitors pushed through heavy red velvet curtains to enter a strange enveloping red rood. In this space, visitors were presented with the work Four for see beauties (2022) where plants, skin and tentacle blur in a flurry of sensual bodily imagery. The room’s redness functioned as an intentional recreation of the womb. Ironically, PICA ensured entering the room required embodying a sperm and pushing past several layers of heavy curtains, reenacting sperm cells infiltrating the egg. Beyond the womb, visitors encountered various scenes. A grandmother explains the world to her daughter while in a different room, an old woman takes flight. Oui Move in You was an exhibition that truly deserves to call itself immersive; one where art was experienced as a bodily and spatial sensation. The only drawback is what can only be described as the bad pun overshadowing the exhibition name. Oui Move in You evokes corny French wordplay and poorly timed puns. What is gained by this cheap nod to Prouvost’s heritage? But if you can look past the title, Oui Move in You was a staggering display of Prouvost’s masterful visual storytelling.


Form and Feeling 
Stanley Spencer, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Kathleen O’Connor, Frank Auerbach, and others.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 21 December 2024 – 4 May 2025.

2024 was the year of green: BRAT, Wicked, and the moodily verdigris walls of Form and Feeling. The exhibition is an ambitious yet understated contribution to AGWA’s programming in a year dominated by significantly more vibes-based and pocket-lining curatorial swings. Pulling from the State Art Collection, Form and Feeling is a joyful web of trial and error that tracks the turn towards early 20th century modernism in English and Australian painting. Of particular focus are those who trained at or were influenced by London’s Slade School of Art. It is refreshing to see so many works exhumed from AGWA’s idle storage and presented in a narrative that prioritises a complex history of internationalism over parochialism, the latter approach to this period a trapping  far too often adhered to by so many curators. The works exhibited included just as many sketches as paintings. Form and Feeling hits its stride when it engages in these tensions of exchange, trial and error, and the sometimes dissatisfying or indecipherable tedium of creation.
        The throughline of this exhibition is not always clear. It is ostensibly about the collection of British art by Australian institutions during the 20th century and how these collections impacted Australian artists. A small display of some Kathleen O’Connor sketches does double-duty engaging with the lack of female representation in these collections, but such a criticism could be taken further. Collecting is one side, the other is the ongoing responsibility of institutions to invest in the conservation and research of work by such underrepresented female artists. For many institutions (AGWA included) the works of female artists that did manage to slide into the collection are in such poor condition after years of institutional neglect that they are simply in no state to be hauled out of storage. This is a digression, but a more self-reflexive criticism would have been an incisive curatorial addition to addressing the pervasive “women issue” in these kinds of collection-based interrogations.
        Gripes aside, Form and Feeling sings when stripped back to the methodical draughtsman-like process of labouring until striking gold. The show gives that titular tension, between replication and emotion, space to breathe and is witnessed most notably in hangs of Frank Auerbach and  William Dobell. An extended passage displays over a dozen sheaves of Auerbach’s wretched chicken-scratchings, needled at and agonised over until  (finally!) Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station, Night is revealed in its oil-slicked industrialist russet and olive, chaotic and complete. The wall-text speaks of Auerbach’s interest in capturing the ‘all-at-onceness’ in his art, and the choice to wreath the final Mornington Crescent in all its preliminary iterations surprisingly compliments, rather than detracts from, this ethos. Perhaps Form and Feeling is, too, best enjoyed in its all-at-onceness.


Double Canvases
Simon Denny.
Bill’s PC, 5 April – 5 May 2025.

Two works by Auckland-born Simon Denny shown at Bill’s PC in classic fashion: minimal, placed on pine plinths, no faff, hanging lightbulb in 2 x 2-metre room, focused. It’s the visual art equivalent of sitting alone with the Sennheisers on, listening to Fred Frith. But instead you’re looking at two canvas-prints: photographs of old tube TVs with what appear to be title screens. One reads ‘Introductory Logic: Video Tutorial’ and the other appears to show a title further into the presumed “DVD”, declaring the ‘Key Concept: Soundness’ and ‘Sound = Valid + True.’ The pair of tellies are part of a series Denny produced during a 2010 residency at Artspace in Sydney, in which the artist borrowed phrases and key words from an introductory philosophy course he had enrolled in at the time. Fifteen years on, in the age of Tiktok philosophers, School of Life YouTube summaries, and “professional development” podcasts, the work appears out-of-time, retro, and oddly ambiguous about its own key concept. I find myself enjoying these objects through a sense of nostalgia for an era when tech/media and its increased distribution were often met with optimistic enthusiasm, as opposed to the current state of concern and scepticism. Perhaps Denny’s work already warned of the present, through its incongruous form and content—flattening ideas about reasoning into TV menus. Regardless of these reminiscences, the artworks remain potent and uneasy, best enjoyed in the stark presentation afforded at Bill’s.


Look, Look. Anna Park
Anna Park.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 20 April – 8 September 2024.

Anna Park is the second solo show that Rachel Ciesla has curated in one of the big, ground floor spaces at the Art Gallery of Western Australia as part of the Simon Lee Foundation’s sponsorship of Asian art in the state gallery. It follows an equally impressive solo of Farah Al Qasimi’s photography and video, both artists being part of a young, second-generation diaspora that are redefining Asian art through New York galleries. Park’s large charcoal drawings draw from American advertising and comic books of the 1950s, their speech bubbles and smiling faces a pastiche of David Salle’s paintings. Amidst a collage of venetian blinds, wallpaper and gratuitously white teeth, Park pinpoints the beginnings of global image culture in black and white charcoal drawings. During the 1980s Salle was a figure of moralising derision as New York’s art scene morphed from a hotbed of conceptual and political activism into a hyped investment bubble.  It may be that his critics overlooked what Park reveals in this fascination for newspaper and comic culture, as they contain the seeds of our own era of mass narcissism. The shades of grey in Park’s black and white drawings subdue the viewer by billboarding the zeitgeist without shaming it.

---

Image credits:

1. Adam Sébire, anthropoScene Il: Tideline (detail), 2018, HD video still, courtesy of the artist.

2. Laure Prouvost, Every Sunday, Grand Ma, (detail), 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, image courtesy the artist, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels, carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Madrid, Lisson Gallery, London, New York and Shanghai. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

3. Simon Denny, Double Canvases, at Bill's PC, courtesy of Simon Denny / Bill’s PC.

4. Willy Lenski, Life may be seen as a gesture (detail), 1987, oil and synthetic polymer paint on jute, 50.9 cm x 92.2 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1988. © Willy Lenski 1988.

5. Look, look. Anna Park. Installation view, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2024. Photo: Dan McCabe.