
Freud in the outback
I didn’t much like reading Freud. For a modern woman, a city girl, sexually comfortable and emotionally astute, a philosophy syllabus that persisted with Sigmund Freud’s essays on psychoanalysis, felt lazy, musty, oh so very masculine.

The flaw
It was during the long lockdown of 2020, that I first noticed my eyes ‘playing tricks’ on me, as if they too were bored by the great global shrinking...

Stillness between us
A year living in Tokyo, apart from loved ones and in linguistic isolation, Kevin Chin paints. While depicting the schism one feels when out of water, he brings accord to the fictional panoramic scenes that have stayed with him, with dexterity and finesse. The result, his five-panel painting Between Bridges, is iridescent…

Paintings of Steve’s paintings
Like ‘Solo Man’ before him, ‘Handsome Steve’ – icon of refreshment – has been decommissioned. But before this one time publican, musician and café proprietor resurfaces – reinvented – there must be reflection…

My Funny Valentine
At 528 Hz, love is said to reach us through music. Like the jazz standard interpreted, recorded and enriched (mainly) by numerous musicians (Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Baker), love too endures through art – contributing myth, nuance, and an evolution of form to the frequency (hopefully) of our spiritual connections…

On the spectrum, off the wall
Citing the anarchic potential of colour, Berliner Katharina Grosse pushes the boundaries of subject and object, letting her work bleed across spatial planes. Breaking the rules begins with the foundations – her canvas anything from terra firma, to vertical structures, to the void…

Provenance
As in other faraway places, the culture of the ‘old world’ was deposited in Terra Australis without regard for its suitability to the landscape and climate, and with complete disregard for the Indigenous inhabitants, who had many millennia on the new arrivals…

Precious trash
Limited resources and basic necessity saw Zulu bowl and basket weavers turn to papier mâché, magazines, tins, aluminium cans, and telephone wire to make their wares, creating a look as synonymous with South Africa as its Shweshwe cotton prints…

Kez Hughes ‘The Full Picture’
She’s an apothecary of knowledge in her field, her studio a study in precision – an orderly and extensive array of paints, brushes, tubs and tubes at her disposal. True to previous form, Hughes continues her meticulous record in this series of three large paintings…

Benjamin Lichtenstein ‘Death Adder’ and ‘Paperwork’
April 2013, Chapter House Lane staged an exhibition of work by Melbourne photographer Benjamin Lichtenstein. I first met Ben when Lou and I went to Neo Frames in Collingwood to get works for another exhibition framed. He was working there as a framer…

Andrzej Nowicki 'Feldgrau' and ‘Bifrost’
Via Poland, South Africa and New York, the now Melbourne-based Nowicki, uses mixed media including pastels, graphite, ink and oils for his current collection, Feldgrau. Inspired by lesser known colours and the 1565 Bruegel work, Hunters in the Snow…

Chapter House Lane, the first four months
Telecki is hesitant to brand action or inaction as failure, as different cultures and systems define it differently. Similarly, in her work, foolishness and pointlessness are only surface traits; what’s more lies beneath.

Splinter Mine
Ouchtomsky’s cut and paste technique throws disparate objects together – gold fish/motor vehicle, jonquils/candelabrum. The dioramas, built up in layers of foam core create the kind of futuristic landscapes you might find in a wormhole, space-hopping through abstract timescales.