A balmy summer day, upstairs in an old Victorian meeting hall. High vaulted ceiling, creaky redwood floorboards, tall arched windows, walls covered in decades of peeling paint and torn wallpaper. This is what was Temperance Hall in South Melbourne. Politely and tentatively occupying the space: a bounty of small-scale, diminutive works; many on paper, some acrylics or oils on canvas, all exploring collage aesthetics. One had to move close to these works to engage with them: no immersive phantasmagoria or gargantuan grandstanding here.
This is the group exhibition CUT. The selected artists—Rob McHaffie, Alasdair McLuckie, Andrée van Schaik and Constanze Zikos—have been grouped temporarily in this exhibition in an orbit from the stable at Murray White Room. While all artists share a relationship to this gallery, I wouldn’t regard it as being “curated” (which is now what influencers do by posting a sponsor-led listicle). Thankfully, it’s more like a multi-act bill at a gig venue, which means they may or may not relate to each other, and it doesn’t matter either way. Robyn McKenzie’s brief catalogue essay notes their relation to the “cut” aesthetic of collage, but I found the experience of being in the space with the works to be more powerful than their category or identity. Rather, the show’s remit to decipher, decode and discern each work’s puzzling effect made for an absorbing time spent in a transitory gallery space.
Philip Brophy writes on art among other things.
