The current show at Monash University Museum of Art, Thin Skin, is notable as the largest institutional exhibition in Victoria dedicated solely to contemporary painting in nearly a decade. Presumably for this reason, there has been much logistical support from MUMA for the new exhibition. A quarter of the thirty-six works here are new commissions by MUMA for the exhibition, while others have been ... (read more)
Jarrod Zlatic
Jarrod Zlatic is a musician and writer from Melbourne. He has previously written for Memo Review, Dissect Journal, and Negative Guest List.
Radical Utopia: An archeology of a creative city, curated by Harriet Edquist and Helen Stuckey, is a maximalist experience. Even the title itself is a little unwieldy. The exhibition is an ambitious attempt to outline firstly the emergence of a contemporary, post-modern design culture in Melbourne, and, secondly, to frame this moment as the point at which Melbourne emerged into what the cu ... (read more)
Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary, they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consi ... (read more)
Is there now an elemental quality to data? Amazon and Meta have certainly demonstrated that data can be harnessed like a natural resource. Yet given that we, the users, shed data at an uncontrollable and unknowable rate, perhaps Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are not twenty-first century oil barons so much as the managers of a silkworm farm? Is all this data just simply information? Do we even hav ... (read more)