What's Hot? Whatas Not?
Loss of identity vs variation for its own sake.
dislocation vs province/locality
Nostalgia For the Perfect/exotic/lost World/untouched; vs The perfect world is a mapped, conquered and civilised and known.
Leap into the void vs Time/history is chronological
Future/Past vs Future
Past/Future vs Past
I don't Know vs I Know

Sounding like a horoscope special is Theodore modis's title, forecasting Destiny Predictions, one of the texts used to illustrate the curatorial premise behind the show Same as it ever was, curated by Clare Firth-Smith. It showed at 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne, during September 1999.

In the same vein as a horoscope, the show attempts to plot lifestyle destinations and analyses the possibilities available. Seemingly random instances from the 20th century are revisited. and redisplayed in the nature of empty airpockets of time. Patterns and predictions navigate the territory. Just like the millennium moments ( adverts, from NZ Tele), there is an obsessive replay to the past century as some sort of way of identifying with the future, as in The future- is- now time. The omnipresent science fiction fascination and a passive surrender to no-identity feature. In this way, the show is a giddy serender to the fashion of the artworld as it exists in the emerging Melbourne art scene, and in fact, to fashion. Period.


Some Strategists include,

Love loves to love
Clare Firth Smith has painted a silenced cluster of large stretched canvases featuring architectural freestanding exteriors, lacking in an inside centre or core. These coreless structures exude a funky sameness that makes them alot more likeable than the modernist genius they were born from.

Tack Tickley
Damiano Bertoli has created a stranded organic ( rocket?), installed against a pillar, pointing to the sky , and poised to go nowhere. Made out of cardboard and markerpens and lit by blue lights, it seems badly made when closely inspected. However, it is impressive in its overall scienfific scheme; seeping out like a corrupt computer virus.

Damiano Bertoli Tack Tickley

The Stave-Tree's Produce
Katherine Huang has gathered personal office debris that has now taken on an impersonal chaos. Strangely, it is the artists touch and not the fiction of the narrative that is the more apparent in the installation of low table, housing seethrough packaging of office wastematerial. Facts and figures have become hybrids because they appear to have lost their owner/source.

Bubble and Squeak
Takes its name from the recipe for leftovers: Julian Holcroft has set up an interractive video/computer with mouse available for manipulation by the audience at 200 Gertrude st. There is a home menu, with a choice of 9 electronic clocks pointing at Phil Conner's Groundhog time of 6.00am. Amongst other exiting destinations, included are: Exploding buildings wreathed in orange flames. These remember a time when meaningless killing and destruction was not an issue purely because the 60's tv land didnt think it was. Paradoxically, publically shown pornography was a complete no-no.As the video runs backwards,the sweetly anticipated moment of bare pussy is disabled as the appropriated 60s porno lady gradually puts her clohes back on. In a way, the void in time loses any association with morality, because the event never happened.