Don’t Look Away!
A prolific hyperproduction and sense of take-over lifted the Brio’s head out of the fray.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my writings about contemporary artworks that were perhaps overly steeped in the heaviness of historical and ongoing trauma without fully grappling with other deregulating energies — scrappiness, coolness, abundance, tall tales, and piss-takes. These entanglements not only provide moments of levity within traumatic storying, as well as sometimes profound relief and jibing political critique. They also can refuse demands for certain cultural and personal stories while offering an unflinching picturing of the whole tangled mess of settler-colonial Australia.
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Don’t Look Away! by Jessyca Hutchens is featured in full in Issue 2 of Memo magazine.
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Jas H. Duke was a poet, performer, and anarchist whose art erupted from the margins. In 1973, he returned to Melbourne after years in England, bringing with him an electrified style of performance poetry and a deep affinity for Dada. A fixture of underground cinema and experimental literature, Duke remains difficult to contain.
The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
