John Hurrell – 15 December, 2025

Presented downtown in Anzac Ave in a first floor office, this show of five artists looks at a group of obsolete designs and technologies once functioning within telephone and newsreel design—methods of interpersonal communication that transmit sound over long distances and image within comparatively short ones—noting their place in design history. As you’d expect from Barton its curator, it has a conceptualist emphasis.

Its title obliquely references the wispy olfactory traces of smoke in the ether. Or perhaps, to be wildly imaginative but very sinister, Nazi extermination camps. In more general popular usage, it would signify the increasing possibility of damaged property and burning or asphyxiation that might easily lead to death.

Much experienced ex-Adam director/curator, Christina Barton, has created an exciting line up, with a free, informative and entertaining hand-out to introduce the different artists’ approaches to object/idea production. As she explains using an amusing Calvino quote about annoying telephones, her overall use of smoke as a metaphor focusses on time as a mysterious quality that clings to walls and objects. It affects how we perceive obsolete factory-made items like phones when they are encountered. The emotional residues linked to their design; our feelings and associated memories.

Most dominant in the room, on a couple of unfolded tubular tables, are eleven handwritten, message-laden faxes sent by artists and curators to Julian Dashper as part of a clever project he initiated over 1994-96. What normally would, after transmission for various jobs, be screwed up and tossed in the rubbish, is now carefully preserved, kept flat and then exhibited as ‘art’. Normally despised detritus has its status elevated. Dashper’s decision humorously plays topsy-turvy with the expected convention.

Some of the other ‘telephone’ works in this show, such as David Clegg’s artist-published postcards and Christian Marclay’s little book are well known. The faxes are fascinating, but however the real treat in Barton’s project, and for me a big surprise, is the fast-moving and excitingly dynamic, 2017 film (Newsreel 63 —The Train of Shadows, 2017) from Nika Autor. It celebrates the surging dynamics of accelerating locomotive movement, and features a video made with a cell phone, showing refugees travelling horizontally, dangerously low down on the engine above the rails, reclining precariously between the churning wheels.

John Hurrell

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