Night Moves is a student volunteer exhibition at SCASS’ Backspace Gallery running from 22 August to 5 September 2024. It features work by Maya Seelig, Stella Bennett, Nana Umetani Schulze, 1001 Puddles and Tom Martin, and was curated by Will Naufahu.
This review describes a room you can come visit in time.
CITY WALK is a recent urban Chinese saying. It means something like ‘city activation’ through ‘art’.
This gallery space is on level three of the Wentworth Building on City Road run by The Sydney College of the Arts Student Society (SCASS), not to be confused with another space bearing the same name in Ballarat, on the land of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin nation. A sometimes place with white and glass walls, the light here streams steadily from the ceiling.
If you steer your boat-body into a small nowhere Will Naufahu has bothered to curate, it will run past black asbestos garden scoopings piled on Seelig’s white pages, painted with blown-up captured greens by hidden bulb. Will you linger among Schulze’s wooden reeds, or is your time already allocated to connecting to family, understanding the Australian government’s visa discrimination, getting your money back from scams and minimum academic and living activities?
Fragmented了，1001 Puddles’ recreations of stills from the 2013 film Night Moves no longer represents rural masculine paranoia, hardly disguised behind environmental concern. Instead, the photography now houses the suburban urge to fuck shit up. Or at least, up-end oneself.
Naufahu’s day greys (in skies) and Bennett’s lamp (in window) pooling red renders the experience less than ambient. In the lovingly polished glass, I see our reflections, endlessly echoing, choking black, all plugs and framed shiny photographs.
Spend time on group art against visa discrimination for more student art.
