Blindside Gallery, Mebourne 2006 and La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo 2008

In Modern Memory is a touring show originally exhibited at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne in 2006. The Bendigo exhibition is an expanded version of the original ‘mockumentary’ show, which used painting and photography to cut through the mythologies surrounding Australian Modernism; in particular, the world of Heide.

A lot of the myths that have grown up about Heide make nice stories but we don’t want to perpetrate the same old things. We want to take a fresh look at Heide’s history and we also want to engage with contemporary art and ideas (Heide Director, Lesley Alway, The Age, 12 July 2006).

As contemporary artists we acknowledge that historical fragments and records exist as powerful talismans of era and milieu. However, these records have often been overused and edited to bolster and sentimentalise key cultural myths. Our photographs create gentle parodies of the modernist mystique. To that end we recreate the famous Heide kitchen table shot, complete with period detail. Verisimilitude is not our aim. The museum quality of this recreation is undermined by humorous additions, including bogus photo albums of imagined Heide scenes. The table set is counter-pointed by a large wall of painted monochrome fragments. These fragments feature banal or inconsequential

details abstracted from a range of sources, including original period photos and iconic modernist paintings. Usually art historians and the media take control of cultural histories. Re-enactment allows us to comment on how cultural memories are made and who gets to make them.

In 2005 we began working with themes of modernist cultural memory in the lead-up to our residency at Bundanon, itself a shrine to modernist cultural memory. At a time when the media has been saturated with images of Heide modernism, it is timely to reassess the ongoing production of cultural memory as nostalgia. We have made this installation in the spirit of engaging with new reflections on the past. Ironically, this exploration may connect us back to the playful impulses of that very group of artists referenced across the installation.