MOP vs Chalkhorse
MOP 10 April - 27 April
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Chalkhorse 10 April - 26 April
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By Adam Jasper
Tim Moore, Bande eccellenti del cavallo del hero, 2008
What’s left behind after opening night, with its cheap booze and bonhomie? What remains after the plastic cups have been swept away, the stains have been tended to, and the hangovers nursed into remission? How many galleries in Sydney are worth visiting after the lurching flirting of Thursday night has been forgotten? We tried this out, and the results are uneven.
MOP and Chalkhorse are in head-to-head competition at the moment, as their schedules sync up to produce openings on the same Thursday of the month. Both of them attract a young crowd, and both inhabit a sort of shifting middle ground between being artist-run initiatives (ARIs, as the industry jargon terms them) and semi-commercial spaces.
We love MOP, we really do, but it’s current exhibition isn’t really up to snuff. Justin Trendall’s “cultural monument” prints, with their intricate networks of lines awkwardly pairing names like Susan Renouf to Vladimir Tatlin, are charming enough. But he’s been making them for a few years now, and it’s starting to look a little lazy. In fact, they look a bit like tea towels printed with a witty nihilistic message. It’s a shame they’re so expensive.
Chalkhorse is harder to love, maybe it’s the signage, maybe it’s because they’re on a winning streak. All the same, its current downstairs show has some annoyingly good stuff. Tim Moore’s Tan Lines, a series of embroidered images of nudists, are very good indeed. Making nudists out of textiles might seem a bit obvious an irony, but we really liked the dirty penumbra formed by the ring on which they were stitched. Tara Marynowsky’s horrible, lamprey-toothed protagonists in Tales got us really excited in a nauseated horror story kind of way. Danny Morse’s Great Whites also made us happy. When was the last time you saw a painting of Steven Hawking spinning weightless through space? Go check him out on your lunchbreak.