Five Absolute Must-See March Exhibitions in Melbourne
Art meets food, fashion and the freaky.
Five Absolute Must-See March Exhibitions in Melbourne
Art meets food, fashion and the freaky.
Melbourne is alive in March. The mad month sees the city host the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, the Festival of Live Art and the Fashion Festival — but that doesn't mean you don't have time to squeeze in some art. Not when these exhibitions are at your fingertips, anyway.
If you get a spare sec, you might want to get a quick refresher on 200 years of Australian fashion thanks to the NGV, or perhaps dive into the depths of unofficial Disney online forums. Got a bit longer? May as well road trip to Shepparton — not all this art is confined to the city limits. Whatever you have time for, make sure you see at least a few of these great shows before the month is out.
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The ethics of food will be in frame as part of a brand new exhibition at the Shepparton Art Museum. Running from February until late May, Cornucopia brings together the work of more than a dozen established and emerging artists from around Australia and the world. Spanning a variety of different mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, print, video and installation, it will force visitors to ponder the myriad questions relating to the production, distribution and consumption of food.
The exhibition will examine these issues on both a local and global scale. Drawing their inspirations from the culinary traditions of rural Victoria, local artist collective the Hotham Street Ladies will create a large-scale replica of an old lady’s living room made predominately from buttercream and royal icing. Other pieces will include Gabrielle de Vietri’s Dumpster Dived Diner — a photographic work depicting a banquet made entirely of food fished out of rubbish bins — and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s time lapse video A Little Death, which depicts the rapid decay of a dead rabbit.
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In the fashion world, Australia is the little engine that could. Due to our isolation from the major fashion centres in Europe and America and our extreme and out of sync seasons, the Aussie fashion landscape has always played by a different set of rules.
To celebrate our identity and history, the National Gallery of Victoria are displaying 200 years of fashion with an exhibition that explores the history of Aussie style — and it goes way beyond the pluggers and footy short combo. Outfits by the contemporary greats that do us proud on the international stage — including Dion Lee, Ellery, Romance Was Born, Toni Maticevski, Pageant and more — will be displayed alongside a retrospective of historic design and a series of interactive pop-up talks to discuss the future identity of the industry.
The exhibition runs over four galleries and will feature an assortment of footage, interviews, photographs and illustrations. It’s the perfect exhibition to bone up on your fashion history so you can dominate any blue sweater-wearing plebs who snigger at your outfit, ala Miranda Priestly.
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If you venture to KINGS Artist-Run gallery during March, you’ll find a three-fer. Three separate exhibitions are on display at the King Street space from Friday, March 4, all by up-and-coming artists with big ideas.
In the front gallery you’ll find RIP Angel (She Fell From Heaven and Landed in Our Hearts), a series by Melbourne-based artist James Parkinson. Parkinson has already won our hearts with his 2015 exhibition Free Time (which included a ball pit), and although the title of this exhibition sounds a little glum, the work itself is an exploration of the content of a sincere forum about a deceased cat found on an unofficial Disney website entitled micechat.com. And beyond that, it’s a look at capitalism and our relation to objects.
In the middle gallery you’ll find a tableau by sculptural artist Natalie Philipatos and photographer Majed Fayad entitled Beauty and the West, which examines the role of the media in shaping beauty ideals. The side gallery will hold the work of Jessie Willow Tucker, who explores the uncomfortable relationship between high and low art in her self-consciously kitsch paintings, aptly titled Horse Sense. The exhibition runs until March 26.
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For anyone who saw The Craft and never quite got over it, read Goosebumps against their parent’s better advice (and couldn’t sleep for a week afterwards), or obsessed over collage and other ’90s pastimes, this exhibition’s for you.
Taking two hands to the idea of worship, Beast Cult is a collection of knitted, woven and printed garments. Inspired by everything from beast worship to séances to 90s nostalgia, artists Eileen Braybrook and John Brooks have created a collection of soft sculptural objects and pieces that have been finger painted, potato stamped and collaged to resemble that of the occult.
With a background in textile design, pattern making and drawing between them, Braybrook and Brooks have created an oddly unnerving exhibition. It will be on display at Tinning Street gallery until Sunday, March 20.
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ACMI’s new exhibition will take visitors on a ride through the formative days of film history. Created by Daniel Crooks with the help of the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, Phantom Ride harkens back to the so-called phantom rides of the early 1900s, in which filmmakers attached cameras to the front of a vehicle to replicate the sensation of movement.
In this contemporary take, Crooks has stitched together hours of disparate footage to create the illusion of a single journey. “Phantom Ride comes out of my long held fascination with the convergence of trains, the birth of cinema and modern ideas and representations of time,” says the artist, who will also be on hand on the evening of Tuesday, February 23 to present a selection of his short film works on the big screen.
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