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Choose Art | Give Light to Refugees An online exhibition and silent auction in support of the charity helprefugees.org. All funds received from the sales of artworks will be donated directly to Help Refugees. Spanning three weeks, the online exhibition aims to raise funds for the refugees affected by the COVID-19 crisis through the love of art, 8–29 June 2020. IMAGE CREDITS (in order of appearance): Fiona WHITE | Joonhong MIN, Urban Camouflage | Guy WARREN | John BEARD | Jo LANE All images courtesy of the artists helprefugees.org
CONTENTS CHOOSE ART : GIVE LIGHT TO REFUGEES
Online Auction ........................................................................................
PETER DOHERTY : COVID-19 - THE CROWN
Deep Trouble ..........................................................................................
RACHEL MENZIES : DEATH TO EVERYONE
Deep Trouble ..........................................................................................
SEX & DEATH
Web Series by Kewl ...............................................................................
HEY COVID-19 THANKS FOR THE GOOD TIMES
Callum R Scott .......................................................................................
MERRAN ESSON : STANDING STILL & SILENTLY BALANCING
Callum R Scott .......................................................................................
JUNE/JULY SALON
Jumpin’ Jehosephat .................................................................................
02 14 15 16 18
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COVER: Paola BALLA (Wemba Wemba, Gunditjmara), The Mok Mok Cooking Show II, 2016 Digital pigment print on 188gsm Photorag 710 x 960 mm (unframed). Affirmation, part of Photo 2020, Koorie Heritage Trust, Yarra Building, Federation Square, Melbourne (VIC), free entry, extended until 23 August 2020 - koorieheritagetrust.com.au Issue 173 JUNE - JULY 2020 trouble is an independent monthly mag for promotion of arts and culture Published by Trouble Magazine Pty Ltd. ISSN 1449-3926 EDITOR Steve Proposch CONTRIBUTORS Mark Halloran, Callum R Scott, Kewl, love. FOLLOW on issuu, facebook & twitter SUBSCRIBE at troublemag.com READER ADVICE: Trouble magazine contains artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and the names, images or artworks of deceased Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. Treat Trouble intelligently, as you expect to be treated by others. Collect or dispose of thoughtfully. DIS IS DE DISCLAIMER! The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions. All content in this publication is copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior permission of the publisher. Trouble is distributed online from the first of every month of publication but accepts no responsibility for any inconvenience or financial loss in the event of delays. Phew!
Peter Doherty : COVID 19 - The Crown In conversation with Laureate Professor Peter Doherty who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discoveries about transplantations and ‘killer’ T cell immunity. We discuss the COVID19 pandemic in terms of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells, the case against trying to develop herd immunity as well as the likelihood and timeline for vaccine development. See also – doherty.edu.au Listen to all of the Deep Trouble interviews we’ve run to date at troublemag.com or look for us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Mixcloud, etc.
PODCAST with Dr Mark Halloran
Rachel Menzies : Death to Everyone In conversation with Rachel Menzies, a psychologist at the University of Sydney whose research focusses on the association between death anxiety and psychopathology. We discuss the role of death anxiety during the COVID19 pandemic, Terror Management Theory and the psychological benefits of contemplating daily your inevitable demise. See also – rachelmenzies.com Listen to all of the Deep Trouble interviews we’ve run to date at troublemag.com or look for us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Mixcloud, etc.
Episode 3 – You’re Too Good Looking Charlie discovers something strange about Pat’s boss. Tanya confronts Damian about why he never got Charlie off.
Web Series SEX & DEATH follows aspiring but hopeless actress Charlie and her lost cause attempts at romance. Produced by Tobias Willis (Now Sound 2018) and starring actor, writer and director Kathleen Lee (Bush Trip 2016) as the protagonist, this six-part comedic web series explores relationships, virtue, self-discovery and self-expression in a semi-autobiographical exploration into the neurodiverse life and brain of Kathleen Lee. See the whole series at sexanddeath.online
Episode 4 – Oh My God I Love You After yet another humiliating acting class for Charlie, Tanya reveals some incredibly unwelcome news.
HEY COVID-19 thanks for the
GOOD TIMES Callum R. Scott
One afternoon you rock up to your hospo job with a hangover, only to find that it’s closed its doors indefinitely and suddenly you’re unemployed again. With fuck all in your savings account, you decide to drown your sorrows in the pub across the road, but it’s closed its doors too.
4 original image CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM / Public domain Lovehearts & layout courtesy of trouble magazine.
The next morning you jump on Seek and the world is your oyster. You’re presented with page after page of life-changing employment. Here there are fresh opportunities and the lure of cold, hard cash that’ll elevate you from cask wine to bottled wine; from two-minute noodles to a main at Sushi Noodle Guy. On day two, once you’ve updated your CV and written a cover letter, you start pumping out the applications. After two or three hours you actually feel like you’ve done a day’s work and sit down for a glass of Banrock Estate and a hearty bowl of Mi Goreng to celebrate. When you rise on day three you eagerly scan your email account for all the replies you dreamt about during the previous night’s slumber. Yes, Seek has sent you a ‘Job Application Confirmation’ email but no, your future employers are apparently also in lockdown and oblivious to your brilliantly written cover letter and excellently formatted CV. You combat the disappointment of no ‘actual’ replies by applying for more jobs. Matchworks is next – the not-for-profit job agency time forgot. Enough said. So you try CareerOne, LinkedIn, Indeed, ArtsHub, something called Neuvoo, you even try Gumtree, for Christ’s sake, and suddenly you’re surrounded by a flurry of virtual paper swirling around your head, cartoon-like, with daytime television and, in particular, Ellen, sitting cross-legged and calm on her Covid-19 chair, taunting you from every corner of your mind. Ellen stands up and begins to dance. The audience loves it. Ellen: funny, popular, rich, employed, Ellen. You decide that job hunting is like having your own TV show that nobody wants to watch. You dance like Ellen, but nobody wants to dance with you. Hey Covid-19 Thanks for the Good Times / Callum R Scott
After a week of moping through multiple applications on multiple sites, you find yourself reluctantly calling Centrelink for your Customer Reference Number and being on hold for two hours. You can smell the desperation, and, what’s worse, you’re now a part of a dreaded system where you become accountable for your every inaction. In Centrelink, no one can hear you scream. Well they can but they just call security. A month passes and maybe you’ve embraced unemployment and decided to use this time to write a novel or covertly photograph some street art at dawn with the help of a friend who’s always unemployed and likely to be rejoicing at the increase of their fortnightly payment and thus in an agreeable state of mind. Once the project is underway you become elated and regard it as your job (and so you should). You pass off this time of unemployment as an opportunity to explore yourself and your art. Your life develops greater meaning. Until… Just as you begin to regard yourself as a serious but potentially homeless artist, a recruitment agency call you and invites you to participate in a Zoom interview, and you’re excited but have no idea which job they are talking about. You rake through your wardrobe for your interview clothes nonetheless (just the top half). Your suit jacket and business shirt need an iron and smell stale, so you spray them with deodorant and leave them out to air. The next day you download Zoom onto your laptop and dazzle the recruitment people with your experience and devastating repartee. They like your jacket and shirt and have no idea you’re wearing only boxers down below. They smile at you with twenty-first century teeth and promise you the employment equivalent of a rose garden. You
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quit Zoom, pour yourself a Banrock Estate and a week later you walk into an appropriately socially distanced call centre to start your new job. A team leader greets you wearing the new K-mart range of office wear, and you join five others in a training room to watch a video about telecommunications etiquette. For three months you endure minimum wage and enthusiastic team leaders who speak in jargon and say, ‘does that make sense’ fifty times a day. You don’t smoke but get in with the smokers because they’re more fun and hate the job as much as you do. You go home each night and drink a couple of bottles of Bowlers Run because it’s less than five dollars a bottle. One morning you wake up to a call from the recruitment agency advising you that the call centre no longer wants you, muttering something about ‘attitude’. You quickly decide self-isolation and being on Centrelink is better than listening to corporate bullshit all day and selling your soul to a two-dollar shop version of the devil anyway. You roll over and go back to sleep. A few days later you jump on Seek again, but deep down you know you’ll be dragging out that arts project in less than a month. You get up, use your Covid-19 exercise time to walk to the bottle-o and buy a cask of Golden Oak medium dry white, before heading quickly home, and turning on the television. Ellen dances towards you. Callum R Scott oscillates between being elated and very angry and sometimes both at the same time. Apart from researching and writing, he enjoys a good pint and lives in a flat in Brunswick, close to his favourite place, Barkly Square. His greatest disappointment in life is that his first memory turned out to be a lie. He didn’t lose a red wellie on a beach in Orkney and now he has no first memory, just a lot of stories about alcohol and bad decisions. This story was originally published on Callum’s blog - callumrscott.com
2020 Acquisitive Sculpture Award and Exhibition The Sculpture Award has been postponed until 2021 due to COVID-19, but the finalists have been announced. Congratulations to: Mark Booth, Jennifer Cochrane, Chris Edwards, Harrie Fasher, John Fitzmaurice, Jim Flook, Martin George, Akira Kamada, Bec Litvan, Ludwig Mlcek, Ingrid Morley, VlasĂŠ Nikoleski, Denese Oates, John Petrie, Kirsteen Pieterse, Louis Pratt, Sasha Reid, Samantha Stephenson, Jayanto Tan, Arthur Wicks, and Merran Esson with her work Standing Still & Silently Balancing.
Merran Esson Standing Still and Silently Balancing fired clay, metal poles and cast concrete
WORKS IN PROGRESS STATEMENT MERRAN ESSON This work was to be about the joyousness of colour and bloom in the spring of 2019, but as the work was in process, the snowy area around my birthplace, near Tumbarumba, was burnt by the New Years Eve fire. In the aftermath of fire colour was gone, but stillness remained. There was silence everywhere, and if I was to begin this work again it would be using black clay. Now with the isolation that has come with coronavirus, there is a quietness in my studio; exhibition commitments and travel plans have all been postponed until 2021. On a professional level, I am delighted as work now has time to develop, and challenges about how to install this work can now be resolved. The world has slowed down, and there is time to get lost in the process of making, quietly pinching and coiling clay and allowing the forms to grow at their own speed. It is exciting. For more info and up to date details of event dates - westernsydney.edu.au
june/july salon
PREVIOUS SPREAD: Julian DAY, The Body is an Act. Installation view: Melrose Wing, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; photo: Saul Steed. Part of the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Monster Theatres at The Art Gallery of South Australia. AGSA will reopen its doors to the public on Friday 5 June 2020. Monster Theatres will be extended until Sunday 2 August. Details are available here. LEFT & ABOVE: Debra PHILLIPS, A perfect thing moves in circles (fig. 6), from The Good. The Just. The Beautiful. 2017, pigment inkjet print, 175 x 135.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney. Winner of the Murray Art Museum Albury National Photography Prize 2020, proudly supported by the MAMA Art Foundation, Murray Art Museum Albury, 546 Dean St, Albury (NSW), until 14 June 2020 - mamalbury.com.au Due to COVID19 restrictions, please check details with the gallery prior to your visit.
june/july salon
PREVIOUS SPREAD: Jan Hendrik SCHELTEMA, Early Morning Start, Gippsland c.1895, oil on canvas, 61.2 x 102cm. Collection Gippsland Art Gallery. Purchased with the assistance of the John Leslie Foundation, 2018. Jan Hendrik Scheltema: The Lost Impressionist, Gippsland Art Gallery, 70 Foster St Sale (VIC), until 9 August 2020 gippslandartgallery.com THIS SPREAD: (l) Kaiit (r) Gretchen Parlato - These Digital Times. Presented by the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF). Due to COVID-19, MIJF will present These Digital Times, an online music festival series featuring local and international artists on 30 May, 27 June & 25 July 2020. FREE. Visit melbournejazz.com
