The title of Fiona Connor’s major new exhibition at MUMA is more literal than most. Wallworks sees the Los Angeles-based New Zealand artist mimic fragments of university architecture (namely walls) from Monash’s various campuses, installing them in a dynamic fashion throughout MUMA’s spaces. But this exhibition is as much about what hangs on these reconstituted amalgams of plaster, imitation bricks and mortar as the walls on their own. In its strange way, Wallworks is in fact a MUMA collection show – one that includes a vast Geoff Lowe, a Michael Nicholls gouache from 1984, a John Olsen lithograph, a Marianne Baillieu and Noel Counihan’s Groping fingers (1979), which hangs on a fragment of wall space “quoted” from a pharmacy library building on the Parkville Campus. Indeed, Connor’s unconventional installation essentially renders these works as social and vernacular objects. Whether mounted on an obscured wall behind the staff toilets, or on a distinctly 1970s wood grain panel in an administrative office, paintings and artworks don’t live in a vacuum. They exist alongside and as part of lives and experiences.
Until September 20; Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, 9906 4217, monash.edu/muma

A WINDOW THAT ISN’T THERE…

There’s a spectral, surrealist and absurdist bent to this group show of lens-based works, installations, drawings and prints. Curated by Michael Vale and including a stunning 16mm film and video loop by Luhsun Tan, the painted bronzes of Philippe Vranjes and several others, A window that isn’t there… positions the notion of perception as contested space amid the witnessed, the conditioned and the imagined. Amelie Scalercio’s hyper-detailed drawings implant eyeballs and wraith-like flashes of figuration into epic landscapes and plumes of volcanic ash. That the works carry popular song titles suggests a playful free-associative jam. Daniela Gullotta’s photographs depict abandoned decaying buildings, teasing out traces of lives now departed. Norian Paicu’s installation of an office from a parallel dimension is made all the more engaging by its purported function: to weigh and classify turds.
Until August 2; Strange Neighbour, 395–397 Gore Street, Fitzroy, 9041 8727, strangeneighbour.com