Melbourne’s art galleries have started exhibitions again; on 9th January, Friday evening Kings ARI opened first new exhibition for the year. A surprisingly early start with many people still on holidays and Melbourne’s fickle summer weather. A few other larger galleries, like the NGV and RMIT Gallery, have also reopened after the holiday season with exhibitions from last year.

Simon Crosbie’s installation at Kings ARI

At King ARI there are three exhibitions in their three small upstairs exhibitions spaces. In the front gallery there was a group exhibition of four women artists, Amber Stones and Green, curated by Alison Lasek. In the middle gallery, Reveal & Conceal featured a great knitted installation by Simon Crosbie, two videos by Paul Candy and a large text based wall work by Amanda Laming. In the dark of the Side Gallery, the flickering colours of the screens reflected on the white wall creating an image of such a basic beauty. This work, Flickr  Films by Christopher Handran focused my thinking about the technology and art.

Regarding technology and art I finally had the time to see Experimenta Recharge, the 6th International Biennial of Media Art at RMIT Gallery. There was a humming from behind the, now, automatic door into RMIT Gallery as if it was housing immense electoral machines, which indeed it did. There were one hundred digital televisions for, Khaled Sabsabi’s 70,000 Veils a 3D video work of transcendental beauty.

This exhibition of  international artists has been extensively reviewed so I will only add the comment that I had seen a better version of the braking mirror that Anaisa Franco presented, “Broken Mirror” by Lee Yongbaek was much smoother and more beautiful. Franco’s other work the motion activated screaming mouth was just prop comedy. Teamlab answered my question about the watchability of long works of video art with one that last for 100 years.