These Two Things

👁️     👁️

Your friend is leaning on the metal pole of a bus stop. Focused fully on the chapter of their book, which is about summertime, they don’t notice you watching them. They don’t notice the yellow afterglow that turns their clothes, hair, skin and elbows radiant––because it’s summer, after all. They don’t notice you reaching for your phone to try for a picture.

This is the best kind of footage—fleeting.

In their recent exhibition at The Bearded Tit, Athena Thebus transforms the space into a site dedicated to the process of capturing this uninhibited and secret joy. MUSE features the work of four artists across disciplines to weave together a synergetic story. How do we document the intimacies not meant for public consumption? Backlit by the spotlight and display that exists within fashion and celebrity culture, MUSE introduces an intimacy to the commodity.

🩻

Pasted up on the brick wall outside, Nicole Kidman towers as an icon in black and white. Chloé Corkran has created a shrine – yes, to Kidman, but also to the very process of idolising her. Unlike Michelangelo’s works of marble or the kitch figures that populate Madame Tussauds, Corkran’s paste ups were not created to be exact depictions of the icon. Here, the viewer holds no privilege of looking upon this celebrity uninterrupted. Kidman’s embodiment feels obstructed. Across each image, she avoids the viewer’s gaze. Her head bowed elegantly, eyes to the left of you or completely hidden by shadow, these stolen moments were originally shot by paparazzi, rushed and pressured. In her paste ups, Corkran obscures Kidman’s image twice over. The hasty images then printed on receipt paper to strip the colour and squash the resolution.

There exists a paradox here, or perhaps an irony: blowing these images up after first making them more hazy. Our memory makes big these stolen moments. Our idols, our muses, stand candid, brooding and beautiful.

Thebus opens their exhibition statement with a note on Corkran, their ‘original muse’. In the memory, Corkran is uninhibited and acting without the hindrance a voyeur might impose. What of these private moments when the audience hasn’t yet been invited in?

🪩     🪩

In her single channel work, Claudia Nicholson uses personal archived video footage as a call towards the imposed process of assimilation. Titled, An old spelling of my name, the work is a direct reference to Nicholson previous name, Claudia Esperanza Suarez Castro, anglicised from the diaspora. A response to Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Nicholson similarly narrativises a life by weaving existing footage across time and place.

Layering footage to create frames that leak into one another, Nicholson has flattened the boundaries of both place and time. It’s sunset and superimposed over this moving image, it’s night and the light strobes. It’s misty, and then it’s radiant, and then it’s dark again. Pixellated oceans succeed a clear and confident body of water, and the viewer exists in both places at once. The continuity of a love ballad anchors [everything together] and so while we may be flittering, we are not lost.

Perhaps the direct opposite of paparazzi, these  videos were taken by loved ones — rather than strangers — with the intention of being shared with other loved ones — rather than strangers.

📹

The same camcorder that recorded a childhood. It’s now backstage at Australian Fashion Week. Documenting Alix Higgins’s 2025 Resort show, I forgive you god, Aquilina has created footage to depict the show behind the show. Exhilarating, the work spans casting, fitting, pre-show and behind the curtain on show day. Being invited backstage of course adds context to Higgins’s collection, but in this setting of exhibition, and in communication with the works of Corkran and Nicholson, it is a work of intimacy and interrogation. This is an industry that exists to create a commodity; a commodity that exists to be observed. But in his work Something special, Nathan Aquilina pulls the curtain to reveal a dimension usually syphoned away from the consumer. Here, we can perceive the landscape before the spotlight is switched on and aimed stageward. Reminiscent of the BTS footage aired on FashionTV in the early 00s, Aquilina refers to two nostalgias: that of the industry, and that of the home movie,

🪽     🪽

Using existing garments of his, Alix Higgins has created honeylike, a mixed media work of canvas and fabric. It’s critical to the work that the garments have been previously worn, otherwise the intimacy runs the risk of being lost or merely suggestive. honeylike sees spotted, floral striped and white fabric mingle across canvas to create an almost-mirror image. Twisting and interwoven, the fibres drape organically to communicate the whimsy of magnificent disorder.

Each artist across MUSE reconciles the process of finding footage and turning it into something else. An attempt to capture some critical moment. An attempt to portray it to the public with the grandeur it occupies in your mind.

🌅

Oh, have you looked back over that image you took in the summertime recently? The one where the sunlight looks sticky and remarkable? Don’t worry, I know it’s still as great as you remember.