Honours, Victorian College of the Arts
By Thomas Stoddard
I’m on the hunt for something feral. While some graduate art gets stuck in the weeds of safeness or struggles to breathe amidst the hiccuping of academic seriousness, I know that the VCA does have some precedent for what I’m looking for. I’m thinking of prior graduates like shameless edgelord Sammy-Jo Lang-Waite or the neon-flecked grotesqueness of Kurt Medenbach, who in 2020 dumped a few mounds of horse manure into the Stables — an apt place to put it.
I am pleased, then, on my most recent visit, to come across an entire wall smeared with a pungent coating of Keen’s Curry powder. Nicholas Currie’s Don’t look in the dark or something will look back at ya. Paintings by a ghost fella. (2024) may be primarily works of oil on canvas, but his curry wall takes the savoury cake. Its inherent sensory force rejects the confinement of the space, the fragrance spilling out beyond the work’s allotted exhibition area. I get flashes of Joseph Beuys’ Fat Battery (1963) turning gently rancid, seeping out from its confines to drench its cardboard enclosure. Despite the “Do not ingest” label, I can’t help but feel tempted; the feral legacy is alive and kicking.
Nicolas Currie, Don’t look in the dark or something will look back at ya. Paintings by a ghost fella., 2024. Oil on canvas, Keen’s curry powder, wood. VCA, Melbourne. Photo: courtesy of Katie Louise Paine.
Currie’s paintings illustrate self-examination and absence in a visual language that dispenses with overwrought artifice. Rather, we are treated to an understated cheekiness. “This is the back of the painting” reads one line on the front of a canvas consisting of layered blocks of colour: blue, lilac, butter yellow. On an untreated canvas, a painted figure enrobed in a ghostly sheet hangs prone, upside down — a joker in a spot of trouble? On another, adopting a more contemplative tone, rust coloured handprints fan outwards from a rectangular void, suggesting a portrait yet to manifest. It is a tricky thing to pull off irreverence in a way that reads as authentic, but Currie does so through a self-aware balance of restraint and indulgence.
And he is not the only rogue in the Stables’ halls. Venture a little way from the odorous wall and be halted by a wall of black milk-crates. They’re almost gothic in their modulating geometry, plastic pillars of a trashy church. It’s tacky, and instantly charming. Sitting in the centre of the milk-crate shrine is a canvas by Michael Kennedy, covered with a dirty slosh of white and teal. A figure outlined in mustard gold, something between an ogre and a washed-up hair-metal enthusiast, stands lonesome in the sickly foam, wielding a spiked club.
Michael Kennedy, Pine needles and dust, suit jacket and no shirt’’’’’54DN355]]]]] why does the sun go on shining?~despair spring))))), 2024. Paintings, pallets, crates. VCA, Melbourne. Photo: courtesy of Katie Louise Paine.
Kennedy fills out the world of Pine needles and dust, suit jacket and no shirt’’’’’54DN355]]]]] why does the sun go on shining?~despair spring))))) (2024) with an array of congruent paintings and distressed wooden pallets. Some bear scrawls of strange cartoonish demons, others cryptic non-sequitur text. The words “Despair Spring” sit opaque and ominous on one smog-covered work; “tightest pants award 2006” reads another; and I look down to check my own, curious whether I could be awarded such an indictment. All clear, I think. On another canvas the phrase “good painting” is scribbled like a taunt amidst a nightmare of frenetic markings that float above a modest bedspread. Like Currie’s, Kennedy’s work is inventively scruffy, while retaining personal sensitivities that gives it genuine depth. It’s reassuring to sense the irreverent spirits of feral linchpin galleries like Savage Garden or Guzzler persisting in the VCA hallways, intent on keeping us on our toes with a wink and a grin.
Thomas Stoddard is a writer and arts worker in Naarm.