Drawing on her own experiences growing up in Melbourne’s west, artist Rachel Morley uses film and photography to examine how housing, urban planning, and public infrastructure shape identity.
Her upcoming exhibition, Art is not going to help this town, features a series of Super 8 films made in collaboration with her family, reconstructing shared memories of Melbourne’s western suburbs.
Introduced in the 1960s, Super 8 transformed home moviemaking, placing filmmaking into the hands of families and artists alike. Today, Super 8 is favoured for its texture and imperfections.
Through the use of ‘old’ film technology, Morley employs nostalgia as a means to shift a common narrative of outer suburban life. Places often defined by rapid urban expansion, housing stress, or inadequate infrastructure are instead encountered through the warmth of familial memory.
Doing donuts in the supermarket car park with your dad. Spying on your old house with your mum, just to see if anything has changed. These ordinary rituals become acts of belonging.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a Facebook comment posted by a Wyndham resident and captures frustration of communities experiencing extraordinary change while essential infrastructure struggles to keep pace.
Morley adopts the phrase with quiet irony. While art may not solve these structural challenges, it can transform how we understand them. Art is not going to help this town reveals how memory, affection and shared experience become forms of social infrastructure, shaping our relationship to place as profoundly as the roads, housing estates and train stations.
__
Art is not going to help this town opens at Next Wave on Thursday 6 August, coinciding with the final tour of the Around the Block moving image exhibition. This is a free event, please RSVP.
Exhibition Continues: 7–21 August
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 4pm
__
The project was developed in through Kickstart, Next Wave’s flagship artist development program, with the support of Creative Australia and Wyndham City Council.
For more information click here
