Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. - ACCA
Pao Pao of Kelly Yu’s Endlings
Beckoning you in is Pao Pao (the goldfish from Kelly Yu’s Endling) set against a white wall, blocking the exhibition from sight. Being on a plinth, against a stark wall, in a sparse tank, Pao Pao is loneliness in its most raw form. Once recovered from my aquatic animal-related existential crisis, I dutifully read the opening didactic (with a prerequisite Olivia Laing quote on loneliness supplementing the introduction) and finally faced the cavernous hall. ACCA feels almost supernaturally massive inside; a size and scale well suited to an exhibition capitalizing on loneliness, and the inherent connection we all have through those moments. Immediately greeted by a couch suited to a 1990s sitcom with a TV to match is Yu’s aforementioned short-film, though I saved this for the end. I was making a beeline for Melissa Nguyen’s A letter to my mother; A letter to your mother. Rendered in rabbit-skin glue, Nguyen’s works are sublime. Standing, viewing the massive canvases straight on, the glare of the lights obscures the details, moving to the side, you finally get to view them in their understated glory.
Across from Nguyen’s rabbit skin glue memories are Nick Mullaly’s hazy tributes to queer Naarm/Melbourne nightlife, with an echo to be found in Callum McGrath’s what’s after this in the next room. While McGrath scrambles your brain with flashing lights and pulsing crowds, Mullaly’s canvases ooze colour. The haze breaking through, putting in paint the solace and connection of a night out, but also the intangible loneliness of contemplating your own mortality, your own youth, your own choices on a dance floor. Is there anything lonelier than the train home? The ocean between the two continents of painting is Patrick Pound’s The museum of loneliness. Collating his own museum of found objects within the exhibition, Pound underlines the pervasive nature of even the word ‘lonely’ in our culture and media. In the sea of books, records, teddy bears, dolls I zeroed in on the words. All the titles, all the people consumed by the profundity of isolation, the art dedicated to it, the words, the hours.
Pound has a mirror behind him, with Kayla Mattes’ Lonely Planet. Undoubtedly the work I spend the most time with, it is a tapestry of our timelines. Commissioned for the exhibition, it's a masterwork, highly detailed, highly textured, utterly of this moment. The co-star notifications, the memes, the ‘Yoga for Climate Catastrophe and Societal Collapse’ are universal, no matter how isolating the feelings that lead us to them. How 2026 it is makes it a work for all time: a reminder that (hopefully) this too shall pass and that our oracles are not our phones, but the people in them.
The doubling, the conversations continue through the show. Gideon Appah speaks to himself in both his video and his painting, while also being your soundtrack to Lucy Liu’s trio of canvases. The painterly qualities of Appah and Liu echo each other - the drips, the tones - while the works and contents remain distinct. Polly Borland and Natasha Matila-Smith are overtly tied. The space, the writing, interconnects them, though I found myself thinking more of Seth Brown in the other room when once again encountering Borland’s amorphous shapes. While the BOD sculptures and their ilk are not new to me, Brown’s hot dog meta-commentary on social media and AI was. Neither are works that I like. Brown has the edge on making me laugh, but it was sitting on Matila-Smith’s bed, watching her movie, that I could turn back around to Borland and finally see BOD as the bed sheet draped monster that lives in all of us.
Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. explores the worlds of loneliness we inhabit. The flavours of aloneness – the end of the world, in a crowd, in your bed, in your books – are all familiar. The show reaches out as if to say “look we’ve been there.” There’s real beauty in saying: “haven’t we all been a hotdog endlessly scrolling through AI generated pictures of buns?”
Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. Is on at ACCA until August 30.