tony garifalakis, shaun gladwell, matthew griffin, rachel howe, marco roso and blair trethowan curator: mark feary
Family First is obviously not about families; well, not in the tradition sense. Curator Mark Feary maintains that the exhibition sought ‘to demonstrate how subcultural allegiances can inform and contribute to the practices of young artists’, a rhetoric he has explored in previous exhibitions that map similar themes. The problem with this illustrative, essentially didactic, approach was that while it was useful as a point of departure, it became a necessary endpoint; appearing as a blanket enveloping and over-determining what was inarguably a good selection of artists, a solid collection of art works and well-crafted use of an awkward exhibition space.
In line with the exhibition’s theme, Tony Garifalakis was an obvious choice. Not only is his practice goth-styled, it could be said that he is the most hardcore member of Melbourne’s emerging artists subculture; he is so underground, very few have discovered his genius. On show were Garifalakis’s still life and death-metal portraiture paintings on velveteen, originally shown at First Floor, and the ambitious large-scale installation Ruin of Empires, dedicated to the memory of Nik Garifalakis. Détourned high fashion ads that read ‘THE SKULLFUCKERS’ and alarm clocks giving the time as ‘6:66; TIME TO DIE’ provided the backdrop to a blue neon noose, my personal favorite in the show, which all actively worked together to create an installation that successfully transformed and respectfully paid tribute to the subcultural practices of goths, death-metal and glam-rock that all inform Garifalakis’s practice.
Marco Roso’s video Headbangers of the World Unite… Hell is Here greeted you as you walked in the door, although the projection suffered in visibility from sunlight entering the gallery foyer. The stylishly crafted two and a half minutes