Caren Florance and Melinda Smith, Relaxed and Comfortable, 2025. Image courtesy of the artists.
Floor Talk | Interactive Side Eye Session
What: Floor Talk and Interactive Side Eye Session
When: Sunday 26 October, 3pm
Where: Gallery 3, M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith
Cost: Free
Join artist Caren Florance and poet Melinda Smith for an afternoon of side eye at John Howard's Australia.
Hear about their exhibition Corridors of Power (in the M 16 Corridor space of course !), which remixes Cabinet documents, newspaper reports and famous speeches from the Howard Years 1996-2007. Then get hands on for some helltype hand printing and perhaps engage in a little light frottage. To conclude, there will be a community shred, using real shredders.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
About the Exhibition
Corridors of Power, Caren Florance and Melinda Smith
Corridors of Power is the first creative response to the serial release of John Howard’s Cabinet Papers by poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance. The last of the Cabinet Papers are due in 2028. Elected in 1996, even before the first parliamentary sessions of Howard’s first term could officially begin, he was forced to respond to the Port Arthur shootings. In successive terms, he faced the 9/11 global emergency and the TAMPA Crisis and Children Overboard affair, with the panic occasioned by these events eventually evolving into his infamous ‘Pacific Solution’. Howard remained in power for three more ministries, and he remains the longest serving Prime Minister after Robert Menzies. The policy decisions of the Howard Years to 2007 led to the rise of local Neo Liberalism and continue to shape Australia today, including the current aged care system (only just now being overhauled) and the Liberal party's early resistance to action on climate change – as well as a number of myths and legends still circulating today. Of course he also brought in gun control… or did he?
Both artists would like to thank Creative Australia for its support of their ‘Found Poetry of the Howard Years’ project.
Exhibitions run from Friday 3 October - Sunday 26 October
