Cover image of the review

Lucina Lane and Nigel Lendon: Teach the Kids to Strike


16 Jun 2018
Neon Parc 18 May - 16 Jun 2018

I’ve not noticed the terazzo tiles on the floor of Neon Parc’s city gallery. And I’ve been visiting shows at the Bourke Street space for years now. It took Lucina Lane and Nigel Lendon’s collaborative exhibition Teach the kids to strike for me to look hard at just how extraordinarily worn the floors really are. When I ask gallerist Geoff Newton about this, he unpretentiously admits that the floor was the main reason he chose the small, first-floor space over a decade ago.

Lucina Lane, Teach the kids to strike, 2018 (detail). Photo: Christo Crocker

I love Neon Parc – this is no secret. Exhibitions there often easily swing between the sublime and the ridiculous, and just as swiftly back again. The stairwell to the gallery is lit by a Franz West hanging lamp that is sometimes incorporated into groups shows. Three years ago Newton opened a much larger space in Tinning Street, Brunswick. The first show there accommodated a suite of oversized and warped paintings by Dale Frank, reflecting the Melbourne art scene as some kind of grotesque miscreation. I recently saw a Virgin Airlines commercial that lightly jabs at the Melbourne hipster-art mafia in the Sydney Airport. There was something singularly quaint about the cutting use of such a marginal trope to sell tourism off the back of the inter-city culture wars. Lane and Lendon’s use of Neon Parc’s smaller space, situated as it is above a defunct entrance to a Bourke Street newsagent and effectively the entrance to a large multi-story carpark, is transformative in that it focuses our sense of the place.

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