We went to see Weightless Matter at Oddaný directly after visiting the Affordable Art Fair. Let me tell you those two experiences couldn’t be further apart even if they tried. But I’m decidedly not going to tell you about the Kmart stock room we found at the exhibition building masquerading as “affordable”, instead I’m going to tell you about Ava Nunan’s poetic responses to Max Frances’ abstract paintings currently on show at Oddaný.

This is my first time writing a review for a show, thank god its someone I know! Harmonising With My Kitchen Fan is a group show curated by Iona Mackenzie, featuring herself, Madeleine Minack, and Hayley Does at Oddany Gallery in Brunswick. I always love coming into Oddany, I love the drapes, high ceilings and candles scattered about, it is a character in its own right.

I often find that curator’s texts that accompany exhibitions leave me more confused after reading them. Instead of making the vision clearer, I’m usually left with the feeling that the curator wants me to think they’re smarter than me, and that they see something in the work that I don’t. Maybe in part that’s my own insecurity about not “getting it” coming through, but also in part I think it’s a hatred for the over intellectualisation of art and the aptly named “art wank” of it all. BUT!!! Ava Leach-Absalom and Mia Lewin manage to avoid this and instead leave me with a text which “evokes a world of memory not as a linear archive but a flickering presence” - a piece of writing that truly pulls this show together. And! their writing mirrors George Trackl’s poem from which they’ve drawn their inspiration! Oddaný’s current show draws its title from George Trakl’s Memory (fragment); Silently, childhood’s crystalline paths sank in the garden. Memories and remnants of the past are threads that draw this exhibition together, as well as an aesthetic sensibility full of soft neutrals contrasting an industrial feeling.