I popped along to a House Proud installation last night. The series is part of
Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival, and basically it’s artists teaming up to kind
of create an art exhibition in someone’s living room. Yep – it’s in someone’s
actual house. Art on the walls, punters wandering round with plastic glasses
of goon, and the family dog running about. The one I saw featured Miso and
Ghostpatrol, who I both fell in love with a little bit, particularly all the cute paper
designs and creatively vandalised books. Sadly, I only had time to take one quite
awful photo before my camera died – believe me it was better in the flesh! If you’re
in Melbourne over the next week or so, you can see for yourself. There’s four more
House Prouds to go: Friday May 23rd (Emile Zile), 6-9pm at 37 Rupert Street,
Collingwood; Sunday May 25th (Conrad Dudley Bateman), 2-6pm at 373 Howe
Parade, Port Melbourne; Tuesday May 27th (Kotoe Ishii), 6-9pm at 4/61 Little
Oxford Street, Collingwood; and Thursday May 29th (Rowan McNaught), 6-9pm
at 263 Wellington Road, Collingwood. It’s free and you get to have a secret sticky
beak at other people’s houses while indulging in a bit of culture. Thumbs up.

Ooh - this looks like fun. Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is holding a free
Zine Fair this Sunday, May 25th. Punters can sell, buy or swap zines and other
knick knacks, and there will be live music and speakers during the day, including
Craig Schuftan of JJJ’s The Culture Club examining the rockstar as outsider (that’s
at 12.30pm), speakers like Charles Firth and Ozi Batla from The Herd talking about
the art of creative dissent (from 2pm), and then live music from Circle at 5pm,
launching their new album Just Keep Swimming. If you’re in Sydders, it could
be a good time to get yourself some indie publishing goodness.