Suburban baroque, the women who invented collage, multiple landscapes + more!

Friday Degustation: now gluten free

Suburban Baroque: “It was like panning for gold; I got a lot of dirt.”

You might know David Wadelton as the painter of Australian suburbia, or his ongoing photographic documentation of the Melbourne suburb of Northcote, past and present . His new photo book Suburban Baroque is about to be released and has been given a profile in The Age.

“Mr Wadelton has photographed almost 200 suburban interiors – mostly the former homes of European migrants in Melbourne’s northern suburbs – for his new book Suburban Baroque. He took the photos at open inspections after scanning websites such as domain.com.au, searching for telltale clues on the exterior shots of homes.”

“The decor speaks of post-war immigration in a fascinating time capsule, where one experiences a mix of local – the proverbial Franco Cozzo furniture – and imported, defying current minimalist design conventions,” Mr Wadelton says. “I am not sure how many examples there would be of busy rooms like this overseas. It is not art deco or art nouveau, it is like a local cultural manifestation.”

The women who invented collage

According to a new exhibition just opened at the Scottish National Gallery, the grand narrative of the invention of collage is, surprise, gender biased and chronologically limited. In The Spectator Claudia Massie writes that [>] “…sometime around 1912, Picasso invented collage, or, actually, perhaps it was Braque. What they mean is that sometime around 1912 a man of sufficient standing took up a technique that had been quietly practised in largely domestic spheres by a largely female army of amateurs, and applied it in his own work. Cue the universal astonishment of observers who pretended they had never seen such a thing before. […] So thank heavens that the National Galleries of Scotland’s new exhibition, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, is here to set the record straight. A sprawling festival of collage, papier collé, découpage, photomontage, photocollage, cut and paste, scrap work, mosaic work — call it what you will — fills both floors of the gallery and effectively resets the chronology. […] By the time the cubists took up scissors to toy with abstract cut-outs and trompe-l’oeil commercial patterns, the potential of collage had been well established by its domestic progenitors. The 20th century just brought the methods to mainstream art, embraced by a new generation of artists who had grown up in cities so plastered with advertising they were ever-evolving, real-life collages.”

Multiple landscapes

“Pictorial artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has, during the last couple of years, marked himself innovative through his Virtual Reality works in a borderland between art and film. He works as an artist with virtual and synthetic realities, and he creates new complex worlds in digital environments that one as an audience can experience through eg VR or via his smartphone…”

Assorted Links

R.I.P Leon Kossoff

Australian artist bound for Perth [>] with plans for tallest mural in southern hemisphere

Melania Trump ‘Smurfette’ sculpture [>] unveiled in Slovenian home town to mixed reviews

Australian Gothic [>] from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side

An analysis of Lars von Trier’s beautiful ‘Melancholia’ – the first episode in a series of videos on the psychology, philosophy, and ecopsychic content of science fiction film [>] Melancholia: Ego & Extinction

Frank Lloyd Wright’s monumental Ennis House [>] hits the market for $23M

The Deep Fake viral hit [>] The Shining, starring Jim Carrey

And finally…

“It’s hard to believe now, but television didn’t used to be a 24/7/365 affair. TV stations stopped broadcasting late at night and when they were off the air, they would commonly display a test pattern until programming resumed in the morning.Used since the earliest TV broadcasts, test cards were originally physical cards at which a television camera was pointed, and such cards are still often used for calibration, alignment, and matching of cameras and camcorders…”