The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne has opened a new exhibition, Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry, which delves into the complexities of loneliness through works by 11 artists, including actor-painter Lucy Liu, Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, LA artist Seth Brown, and Melbourne-born Polly Borland. The exhibition, curated by Sophie Prince and Myles Russell-Cook, is the first in a series exploring art and emotion, with joy and rage to follow.
A goldfish greets visitors
At the entrance, a forlorn goldfish named Pao Pao swims in a sparse tank. Co-curator Myles Russell-Cook, who owns several fish, named it after the hypothetical last goldfish on Earth in Kelly Yu’s short film Endling. “He’s part of my family, he’ll be coming back to the big tank,” Russell-Cook said.
Defining the loneliness epidemic
Russell-Cook described loneliness as “like being hungry, not knowing what you need or what will satisfy you, like you’ve fallen out of the world.” He added, “We have a loneliness epidemic that resists definition. It’s a kaleidoscope.” The exhibition attempts to distinguish loneliness from being alone and connectivity from connection.
Patrick Pound’s Museum of Loneliness
Artist and archivist Patrick Pound presents The Museum of Loneliness, a new commission featuring dozens of found objects from his vast collection of over 70,000 photographs. Items include an Ikea orangutan soft toy famous as a companion to a rejected baby macaque, animal trinkets, a baby Jesus figurine, LPs, VHS tapes, and a DVD of Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy. A tiny miniature man goes unnoticed by most visitors, and a Lonely Planet guide titled Israel & the Palestinian Territories is included. Pound, who spends hours scrolling eBay, said, “To spend six hours a day on the internet is sort of a tragic thing to do. It’s not that nice a lifestyle. But I’ve also made a community there.”
Horizontalism and catatonia
Co-curator Sophie Prince admitted to lying down when spiralling: “I definitely go kind of catatonic. I lie down a lot. I try to blank out the brain chatter that isn’t helpful.” She noted loneliness is a chemical experience, and practising physical adjustment can help.
Lucy Liu’s three large paintings draw on Japanese shunga, depicting a woman’s intimate moment of self-pleasure. Natasha Matila-Smith’s If I die, please delete my Soundcloud features a bed with rumpled linen, laptop, and headphones; a woman bed rots as text cycles: “Men on dating apps … I just wish they had a personality.”
Technology and loneliness
Seth Brown’s Frank is a mechanical mustard bottle with a frankfurter arm, endlessly swiping Instagram for a perfect AI-generated bun. Kayla Mattes’ seven-metre-long hand-woven textile Lonely Planet, which took a year to complete including over seven months of weaving, incorporates viral memes, Yoga With Adriene, emoji reactions, and the cover of the Magnetic Fields album 69 Love Songs. Mattes said, “I was making Lonely Planet as more and more ridiculous, horrible things were happening in America. There’s a loneliness within doomscrolling.”
Hope through connection
The most hopeful work comes from 26-year-old Melbourne artist Melissa Nguyen. Her commission A letter to my mother; A letter to your mother features three white-on-white canvasses with photographs painted in rabbit skin glue. The works explore her mother Trinh’s flight from the Vietnam war as a child. A letter exchange helped bridge their emotional gap. Trinh said, “I knew she was lonely but she never shared it. I told her about everything I went through [as a refugee]. I never thought she’d share all her feelings with me.”
Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry runs until 30 August at ACCA, Melbourne.
