Dispatch Review respectfully acknowledges the Whadjuk people as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands upon which we live, work and enjoy. We pay deep respect to Elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Reviews:
- An invitation to dance, by Sam Beard.
- We Talk, We Discuss: An Interview with Taring Padi by Max Vickery.
- AGWA x PrideFEST by Felicity Bean.
- Tim Meakins, Body Mould by Sam Beard.
- Nick FitzPatrick, Hero Image by Francis Russell.
- Jacob Kotzee, Arrangements by Dan Glover.
- Hollow Icons: Desmond Mah at Mossenson by Darren Jorgensen.
- Pilgrimage: An interview with Vedika Rampal.
- The UnAustralian: Doubling Double Nation – An interview with Rex Butler.
- Negative Criticism: A Year of Dispatch Review by Tara Heffernan.
- Custodians as Reverse Monument by Darren Jorgensen.
- End of History – LWAG by Francis Russell.
- Hatched Dispatched 2024 by Dan Glover, Jess van Heerden, Nalinie See & Sam Beard.
- David Bromfield: A critic at large and ‘Where did the artists go?’
- Me, Also Me by Sam Beard.
- Paper Trails Between Lion and Swan by Sam Beard.
- Ceramically Speaking by Ben Yaxley.
- The Strelley Mob by Sam Harper.
- Rone: The Mighty Success by Leslie Thompson.
- Paper Trails: An interview with Yeo Chee Kiong by Sam Beard.
- Power 100 by Dispatch Review.
- Foresight & Fiction by Ben Yaxley.
- Twin Peaks Was 30 by Matthew Taggart.
- Breaking News: It’s Rone! by Sam Beard.
- Look, looking at Anna Park by Amelia Birch.
- The Fan by Francis Russell.
- Follower, Leader by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Wanneroo Warholamania by Sam Beard.
- Death Metal Summer by Sam Beard.
- Players, Places: Reprised, Renewed, Reviewed by Aimee Dodds.
- Scholtz: Two Worlds Apart by Corderoy, Fisher, Flaherty, Wilson, Fletcher, Jorgensen, & Glover.
- Partial Sightings by Sam Beard.
- True! Crime. by Aimee Dodds.
- The Human Condition by Rex Butler.
- Light Event by Sam Beard.
- Rejoinder: Archival / Activism by Max Vickery.
- Access and Denial in The Purple Shall Govern by Jess van Heerden.
- 4Spells by Sam Beard.
- Abstract art, DMT capitalism and the ugliness of David Attwood’s paintings
by Darren Jorgensen. - Unearthing new epistemologies of extraction by Samuel Beilby.
- Seek Wisdom by Max Vickery.
- Something for Everyone by Sam Beard.
- Violent Sludge by Aimee Dodds.
- State of Abstraction by Francis Russell.
- Double Histories: Special Issue, with texts by Ian McLean, Terry Smith, and Darren Jorgensen & Sam Beard.
- Six Missing Shows by Sam Beard.
- What We Memorialise by Max Vickery.
- At the End of the Land by Amelia Birch.
- The beautiful is useful by Sam Beard.
- ām / ammā / mā maram by Zali Morgan.
- Making Ground, Breaking Ground by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Art as Asset by Sam Beard.
- Cactus Malpractice by Aimee Dodds.
- Sweet sweet pea by Sam Beard.
- COBRA by Francis Russell.
- PICA Barn by Sam Beard .
- Gallery Hotel Metro by Aimee Dodds.
- A Stroll Through the Sacred, Profane, and Bizarre by Samuel Beilby.
- Filling in the Gaps at Spacingout by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Disneyland Cosmoplitanism by Sam Beard.
- Discovering Revenue by Anonymous.
- Uncomfortable Borrowing by Jess van Heerden.
- It’s Not That Strange by Stirling Kain.
- Hatched Dispatched 2023 by Sam Beard & Aimee Dodds.
- Fuck the Class System by Jess van Heerden, Jacinta Posik, Darren Jorgensen, et al.
- Wild About Nothing by Sam Beard.
- Paranoiac, Peripatetic: Pet Projects by Aimee Dodds.
- An Odd Moment for Women’s Art by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Transmutations by Sam Beard.
- The Post-Vandal by Sam Beard.
- Art Thugs and Humbugs by Max Vickery.
- Disneyland, Paris, Ardross and the artworld by Darren Jorgensen.
- Bizarrely, A Biennale by Aimee Dodds.
- Venus in Tullamarine by Sam Beard.
- Weird Rituals by Sam Beard.
- Random Cube by Francis Russell.
- Yeah, Nah, Rockpool by Aimee Dodds.
- Towards a Blind Horizon by Kieron Broadhurst.
- Being Realistic by Sam Beard.
What does the future hold? Today, with the looming threats of climate change, global conflict, and resource scarcity, it can feel like there is no tangible sense of futurity. The past looms grotesque—a great, hulking beast of information, artefacts, and evidence. The future, by contrast, is a blind horizon. We are travelling through time in a constantly shifting moment. Suffering under the weight of history, it often feels as though there are no other tangible possibilities, except those of the present, available to us.
This constantly shifting present emerges from a past littered with remains, both large and small. The rise and fall of civilisations and the artefacts of many alien cultures exist there, as do the small objects and images we imbue with memory. In this way we are the future of many pasts lost. History is the evidence of entropic, often malevolent forces leaving a rubble-strewn path leading to our present. It appears to us like a Frankenstein’s monster—constructed from the sewn-together parts of many dead things. History of not the past in any true sense. Rather, it is a creature of the now, created for contemporary purposes.
Perhaps it is no wonder then that today so many of us are oriented towards the blind horizon of the future. Over there might lie some other way of living, maybe something better than the now. While we cannot know what world might exist on the other side, we can ask ourselves what world we might want this to be. We can divine hypotheses, hazard guesses, formulate strange prophesies. We can make a model of the world as we might want it and examine it for flaws and weaknesses.
This process is not exact. We gesture towards this horizon with imprecise language. The past haunts us like a ghost—terrible, spectral, possessive. The future come to us like a dream—abstract, limited, incongruous. This imagination is often inaccurate and opaque. However, it is in the gaps between things that we find new possibilities. In the shadows we cast with our imaginings we can glimpse the silhouette of what we cannot see, think, or hear. In failing to cohesively imagine an alternative to the past, or a better future, we find the limitations of our utopian imagination in the present. You cannot imagine a colour you do not know, but you can consider the possibility of one existing.
Artworks have a specific quality in relation to this process of imagining utopias. They are permitted to be fuzzy, out of focus, inaccurate. Art can draw on a broad vernacular of images, objects, sounds, words, and ideas, and reconfigure them into unique combinations. Disparate elements can be brought in relation to one another. Novel combinations of past and present can be proposed. However, like all other means of imagination, art cannot meaningfully predict the future in any real sense. Just like us, it cannot know what lies on the other side of that blind horizon. What art can do is ask what is meaningful to us now, and whether this might be worth preserving for futures yet to come.
This text originally accompanied the exhibition Perimeter Feeling, held at Nyisztor Studio, 15–30 April 2023.
Image credit: Reece Cahill
This constantly shifting present emerges from a past littered with remains, both large and small. The rise and fall of civilisations and the artefacts of many alien cultures exist there, as do the small objects and images we imbue with memory. In this way we are the future of many pasts lost. History is the evidence of entropic, often malevolent forces leaving a rubble-strewn path leading to our present. It appears to us like a Frankenstein’s monster—constructed from the sewn-together parts of many dead things. History of not the past in any true sense. Rather, it is a creature of the now, created for contemporary purposes.
Perhaps it is no wonder then that today so many of us are oriented towards the blind horizon of the future. Over there might lie some other way of living, maybe something better than the now. While we cannot know what world might exist on the other side, we can ask ourselves what world we might want this to be. We can divine hypotheses, hazard guesses, formulate strange prophesies. We can make a model of the world as we might want it and examine it for flaws and weaknesses.
This process is not exact. We gesture towards this horizon with imprecise language. The past haunts us like a ghost—terrible, spectral, possessive. The future come to us like a dream—abstract, limited, incongruous. This imagination is often inaccurate and opaque. However, it is in the gaps between things that we find new possibilities. In the shadows we cast with our imaginings we can glimpse the silhouette of what we cannot see, think, or hear. In failing to cohesively imagine an alternative to the past, or a better future, we find the limitations of our utopian imagination in the present. You cannot imagine a colour you do not know, but you can consider the possibility of one existing.
Artworks have a specific quality in relation to this process of imagining utopias. They are permitted to be fuzzy, out of focus, inaccurate. Art can draw on a broad vernacular of images, objects, sounds, words, and ideas, and reconfigure them into unique combinations. Disparate elements can be brought in relation to one another. Novel combinations of past and present can be proposed. However, like all other means of imagination, art cannot meaningfully predict the future in any real sense. Just like us, it cannot know what lies on the other side of that blind horizon. What art can do is ask what is meaningful to us now, and whether this might be worth preserving for futures yet to come.
This text originally accompanied the exhibition Perimeter Feeling, held at Nyisztor Studio, 15–30 April 2023.
Image credit: Reece Cahill