The Thousands

Editorial wisdom decrees that all things need an intro, so, readers of The Thousands, meet MOP. It is a gallery in Chippendale run by people named Ron & George, who own an actual painting that is by Francis Bacon. MOP, meet readers of The Thousands. They are people who have the internet. Now you guys know each other, MOP has some shows this week that you can all hang out at.

In Gallery 1 there’s Dara Gill, an artist who shows all kinds of work all over the place, is a Director at Firstdraft and is putting on this show as the culmination of a JUMP mentorship with MCA curator Glenn Barkley. His show, entitled In Action, Inaction examines anxiety and how it impacts upon our capacity to get shit done and the ways in which we do or do not manage that.

Next up, artist/performance/people who sometimes wear skeleton suits collective Brown Council occupy Gallery 2 with Group Work. Boards around the gallery will display lists in which each of the four members of the group will have written the names of people who have impacted upon or influenced them, with the catch being that the names are written over the top of one another, compacting them into lexical objects that are invested with a localised intensity of meaning that are, by their cumulative density, rendered simultaneously meaningless as textual signifiers.

Blank Canvas in Gallery 3 is a series of large-scale photographs of household interiors by Alex Wisser. Documentation of the sedimentary aesthetic and affective buildup of human occupation, the pictures of houses that have been lived in by the same person or people for 30 years or more, taken on the day the houses are to be sold by auction and likely renovated the pictures suggest the fragility and disposability of the impact we have on our surroundings.

So, (1) it is hard to be productive, (2) learning things from people ends up being confusing, and (3) we’re all going to die anyway. Art: counteracting all those people who are getting into the Christmas spirit too early.