Millenial Kennels - HAIR
Before this Wednesday, I’d never been to HAIR before – strange, given its proximity to my beloved Queen Vic Market. Across the street from the iconic facade, HAIR neighbours Sticky Institute, and this exhibition spoke directly to its location, and The Last Chance (Rock & Roll Bar), just a few hundred metres away. Millennial Kennels by Jordan Halsall and Steven J Hutton features four kennels made of plywood, printed with images of jeans. The jeans are definitively punk, variously featuring rips, paint, buttons, patches, mending, and distress.
Halsall and Hutton are making a wider point about the living situation that befalls many millennials. The anonymous apartment buildings, each layout a carbon copy of each other, with only the surface level details changed. There's a tension between the rigidity of the plywood structures and the intentional destruction of the jeans. The more I sat with it, the more the flatness of the detail, the jeans being printed on rather than physically there underlined a thesis about the devaluing of individuality, the hollowing out of counter culture in the pursuit of financial stability. Every structure is the same, the differences are how they are entered, for every door (bar the last) leads to the Millennial Kennel.
The kennels made me work for my appreciation of them. It was in a discussion over dinner with friends that I really found my thoughts, and my understanding. That discussion, the defining of ‘millenial kennel’ as an existing term, and our back and forth about what it means to be solidly an adult in Melbourne, with none of the markers of adulthood to show for it. We may be able to vote and buy alcohol – hell, even rent a car– but we have no house, no spouse, no certain career. The embodiment of this fact, presented through the pants and punk counterculture, transformed the works for me, solidified them. We’re a far different generation than our parents, for better or for worse. We’re not guaranteed a career, or a lifetime with a company. Gone are the days where a masters degree guarantees you a job. Halsall and Hutton have distilled this impotence of agency and mobility and action in their work. None of us are wearing the pants anymore.
Millenial Kennels is on at HAIR ARI until 13 April 2026.