damiano bertoli, catherine brown, nadine christensen, gareth donnelly, nick mangan, sandra selig Curated by Josh Milani
lt is not good form to start a review with , 'this is the best group show I've seen in ages', but that was my first and second impression, so why beat around the bush. Mutable Spaces was organised by Josh Milani, who claims it is his first curatorial outing, and featured work by six emerging artists from Melbourne and Brisbane: Damiano Bertoli, Catherine Brown, Nadine Christensen, Gareth Donnelly, Nick Mangan, and Sandra Selig. The dual-urban distinction is a minor point, apart from providing useful cultural traffic. The exhibition does, however, reflect a generation, with all the artists born between 1970 and 1980. In his accompanying catalogue essay, Milani writes of the resurgent interest in materiality and the making of art (things). Resurgence is a stretch because all art has material tissue, even the immaterial work of Robert lrwin and James Turrell, but there is a palpable material presence in this collective outing, a chicken and egg inevitability. Malleability-Milani 's 'mutable'-is, on the other hand, a modernist hallmark. However they chose to slice it, the artists each engaged something of that legacy. Milani also notes the presence of technology (in computer history terms, the artists overlap with the fourth generation, from 1971 to the present): the digital age moves quickly, but is not necessarily better. Damiano Bertoli 's The Diamond Age (one of three works shown), a room-filling , elaborate chandelier made from pristine cardboard, is a slow age work. Bertoli spoke of an evacuation, or an extraction of minimalism from a baroque source (or, eternal and mutable bad taste). Nick Mangan's Articulated Erosions is a balsa foam carved thing with a deliberate machine-like presence. Neither artist is trying to