Cover image of the review

Best and Overlooked of 2018


21 Jul 2018
Ella Sowinska: 80 Ways, 30 Mar - 30 Apr 2018 Meredith Turnbull: Closer, 27 Mar - 1 Jul 2018 Zac Segbedzi and Friends (enemies) Early Career Group Show, West Space 5 Jul - 18 Aug 2018

Best and Overlooked of 2018

Memo Review asked three of our contributors to write on a show they have especially liked but that we haven’t had a chance to review. As a special issue we publish these reviews from Tiarney Miekus, Amelia Winata and Giles Fielke.


Ella Sowinska 80 Ways

recess, Friday 30 March – 30 April 2018

By Tiarney Miekus

Considering the amount of things that can be streamed online—i.e., entire lives—it's peculiar how art is a thing that supposedly doesn't happen on the internet. The reasons seem transparent; for some it's a kind of moralism, the belief that aesthetic transaction happens in the flesh, not the digital, or that something vital is lost in virtual spaces (even though many of the artworks I've felt to be profound were witnessed not in life, but in a more archaic form of reproduction: books). For others it's the nervous conviction that people will stop attending galleries and museums IRL, or, my more sinister suspicion, that non-commercial galleries and museums haven't yet figured out how to monetarise online space in the name of Art. The website is thus relegated to being the gallery's most essential promotional tool, and what makes the Naarm/Melbourne-based online publishing platform recess so valuable is how the website is the exhibition space.

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