The Museum of Contemporary Art's annual spring exhibition Primavera is showcasing the work of selected Australian artists under 35, with this year's curator Tim Riley Walsh posing a crucial question: what does it mean for artists to create in a post-industrial age of reproduction? The exhibition reveals a material fascination running through the featured artists' works, many of whom integrate metallurgy into their installations using machine fabrication techniques.
The show features an array of industrial and everyday objects including traps, cages, monuments, pipes, window frames, carpets, and boomerangs. These are not merely static objects but actively create spaces that prioritize embodied experience, a gesture that particularly resonates in an era when screens dominate daily life. The artists' approach represents a deliberate counter to digital saturation, emphasizing tactile and physical engagement with materials.
The tension between human touch and industrial manufacturing is most clearly demonstrated in Augusta Vinall Richardson's corten steel and copper monoliths. Each block, scaled up from cardboard models, retains traces of handmade imperfections that stand in stark contrast to the engineered precision typically associated with architectural steel. These deliberate marks of inaccuracy represent a conscious break from the exactitude of 1960s Minimalism and its emphasis on repetitive, mass-produced forms.
Francis Carmody's two-part installation takes a more direct approach to examining commodification through his striking piece "Canine Trap I." The work features a white dog dissected at the midsection and trapped within three intersecting silver rings. Nearby, amorphous silver forms crusted with salt and electroplated graphite suggest a production line that ultimately leads to shiny, polished silver vessels. The dogs serve as metaphorical stand-ins for humanity itself, ensnared by the gleaming allure of commodities and capital.
Emmaline Zanelli's installation and two-channel video work brings the exhibition's emphasis on metallurgy and mining infrastructure into sharp focus with her piece "Magic Cave." The installation connects second-hand rat and hamster cages through a labyrinth of plastic tunnels illuminated with colored LEDs, creating a nightscape-like environment. The cages lead viewers into a film centered on teenagers in Roxby Downs, South Australia, where families service the nearby Olympic Dam mine for copper, gold, and uranium.
In Zanelli's video, teenagers appear with exotic pets in their bedrooms, and as a girl dances on one screen, the other cuts to a copper smelter and follows the camera's swift, claustrophobic passage through plastic pipes, echoing a miner's subterranean descent. Positioned at the center of the exhibition and surrounded by gaming chairs, the work successfully embeds the materials of mining into the social realms of both labor and leisure.
The final two works in the exhibition shift focus from extraction to the corporate interior. Alexandra Peters' installation functions as an expanded painting that blurs the boundaries between surface, sculpture, and architecture. Her work features enamel-coated industrial pipes designed to feed oil, gas, or water, coiled with culturally coded hookah tubing that props a false wall over the gallery wall. Window frames double the building's own frames, while a three-panel, screen-printed work on imitation leather hangs above dead stock gray carpet.
Peters' installation evokes the atmosphere of a shell company's foyer, creating what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called "the eerie" – a sense of space emptied of its expected presence. In Peters' hands, this eeriness becomes decentering, with materials and veneers leaving humans adrift in architecture designed for occupation but hollowed of life.
The staging of corporate life also influences Keemon Williams' adjacent installation, which positions the artist's Aboriginal identity as embedded within industrial commodities. His work "Business is Booming" features metal boomerangs fabricated offshore and stacked into towers that read simultaneously as a cityscape and corporate graph. On the wall, a large vinyl chart divides "boom" from "doom," alongside Williams' portraits positioned between those states – in one he lifts a boomerang like a phone, in another he slumps on a modernist sofa. At the media preview, Williams noted with irony that he doesn't know what he'll do with the boomerangs after the show, as they're stripped of their use-value and not designed to be thrown.
Together, Peters and Williams bring the exhibition's focus on material residues into the present tense, with industrial processes and social relations reassembled as corporate veneers, graphs, and flightless boomerangs. Their work clarifies the show's broader stakes and its relevance to contemporary Australian society.
All artists featured in Primavera 2025 were born in the 1990s, a generation that came of age during significant economic and technological shifts. While the following decades marked the global rise of internet and screen culture, more locally, this era witnessed the effects of Australia's trade liberalization. These artists grew up during the collapse of manufacturing, leaving mining extraction and services as dominant economic forces. This fundamental shift resonates throughout the fabricated forms and thematic concerns of the exhibition.
As Karl Marx observed in "Capital," raw materials are never neutral but are products of past labor, carrying within them the history of their extraction. That inheritance runs through all the materials and objects in the exhibition: the corten steel monoliths, the silver canine traps, the mining tunnels, the oil and water pipes, the corporate foyer, and the stacked boomerangs. Each work gestures toward the way industrial materials are embedded within the social and environmental aspects of Australian life.
Throughout the show, artists engage with materials as simultaneously alluring yet toxic, solid yet emptied of use, all bearing the social and political conditions of their making. This critical examination finds its sharpest expression in a line from Zanelli's video, penned by poet Autumn Royal: "I could croak with copper on my nails." The phrase encapsulates the exhibition's central thesis that to make art in a post-industrial age is not to escape commodities, but to reckon with their complex afterlife and ongoing impact on society and the environment.
Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists runs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney until March 8, 2026, offering visitors an opportunity to engage with this critical examination of art-making in the contemporary commodity age.
