‘The Golden Lion’ presented works from varying media in an intimate wood-panelled lounge room and plaster wall of the dining room in a share-house in Thornbury, an inner north suburb of Melbourne. The exhibition was kindly hosted by Dan Miller and his then household, and installed with the support and guidance of Miller and Matthew Greaves. ‘The Golden Lion’ remains as a fever-dream burnt in the artist’s memory.


The exhibition comprised the following:

- two distinct video works displayed on two separate television screens. These video works featured footage of community fitness dancing groups and tai chi practitioners in Chengdu People’s Park, Sichuan. Both works - one three minutes in duration, and the other 14 minutes - synthesised footage aforementioned with a range of other distinct but tangentially-linked travelogue footage taken on a consumer-grade camcorder on months-long travels by foot and by train across Southwest to Eastern China. Sichuan Airlines sponsored exercise videos also prominently feature, where the artist discreetly documented segments while broadcasted on in-flight entertainment units. Both video works bared a dissonant relationship between image and sound (with inspiration taken from Chris Marker’s dynamic approach to image-to-sound in his seminal 1983 film, Sans Soleil). Featured audio recordings were captured by the artist from travels across China and North Korea in 2013;

- a looped screengrab video featuring the artist’s cursor hovering over his Google Calendar as he scrolled indefinitely backwards in time. This work was displayed on a cheap tablet device, plonked on the carpet floor;

- a bundle of local newspapers found on the street. Due to heavy rain exposure, the entire bundle of newspapers were saturated by ink bleed, and the water damage condensed the bundle into a single slab of papers stuck together, with a defined imprint of the binding string which was removed by the artist. This work was placed on the top shelf of the room’s built-in shelving;

- a slowly deteriorating page torn out of a New Scientist magazine, attached to the room’s window with a suction cap and binder clip. This work featured the artist’s scrawling black marker lines on one side of the sheet, redacting the article’s body text in order to highlight the image and article’s subtitle, ‘Smashed atoms recreate quark-gluon soup’. The article’s title is still partially visible under the black marker at the page’s top left, reading ‘Bar at the centre of the galaxy’;

- a stretched, enlarged digital print of the lowest resolution .jpg available on a Google Image search of The Golden Lion trophy, awarded to the Best Artist for their International Exhibition at each Venice Biennale. This distorted representation was hung in the dining room, where it remained long after the conclusion of the exhibition as a central feature of the household’s dining room decor;

- an enlarged print of a fragment of a scanned book page depicting an unnamed stone tablet with the caption ‘future eclipses’ half visible, cut at the print’s bottom edge. This image was sourced from the pseudoscientific book which appears to detail the Ancient Astronauts theory, ‘The Gods were Astronauts’ by Erich von Daniken (to date, the book remains unread by the artist, but it still holds a strange, distant curiosity for him). This digital print was pinned with brass thumb tacks to an inbuilt cork wall in the lounge room.

Photographic documentation of exhibition taken by Dan Miller of Useful Art Services.