As a component of Tiny Movements by Swedish conceptual artist Johanna Billing, the performance piece, You Don’t Love Me Yet, has been presented in over twenty countries since its conception in 2002. Scheduled for August 16, Billing has invited a diverse and exciting collection of Melbourne bands to reinterpret the ever-hopeful tearjerker which was originally recorded by Roky Erikson in 1984. Among those taking part in the event are Beaches, Henry Wagons, Super Wild Horses, Fabulous Diamonds, Tic Toc Tokyo, Francis Plagne, and Teeth and Tongue, each challenged with the task of making something familiar, unique.

The event is being held in conjunction with the ongoing series, You Don’t Have To Call It Music, curated by Melbourne musician and artist Marco Fusinato.

Tiny Movements is opening at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne Friday, August 14 and is Billing’s first solo show in Australia. Often focused on ideas of community, Billing’s work dissects social politics by ritualising and repeating banal everyday interactions and forcing human connection.

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When I read Robinson Crusoe as an Australian child, I had no idea that New Zealand was a place harbouring secret beaches where real life castaways could hide from civilization beneath the shade of cool ferns and caves, on beaches overlooking mysterious islands out at sea. The main difference between Coromandel Peninsula’s New Chums beach and the shipwrecked settings depicted in Defoe’s novel is that the only things running riot here are the crimson blossoms of the native Pohutukawa trees. Instead of toothless mutineers, there are placid dotterel birds nesting beneath the sand.

Part of Wainuiototo Bay, New Chums is accessible by clambering over the wet rocks (remember your balance from gym class?), north-west of Whangapoua Beach. You ascend a dirt track through rainforest to a pale bandage of sand that I thought was reserved for epic novels, or at least South America.

[photos above by Josh Burns]

Back in my days of adolescence, the undeniably cool cast of Heartbreak High were secret idols. That warehouse they lived in! Man, I wanted to be there. But when that went off air, the only taste of beach life in Australia was the vacuity of Home and Away. So it was with real nostalgia, and a full-on rib cracking laugh, that I caught my first episode of the spoof documentary Summer Heights High. It’s absolutely hilarious, there’s no two ways about it. It’s The Office, as interpreted by an Aussie high school.

There’s a wonderful sense of escapism about the work of Australian photographer, Eva Trust. The wavy, flowing textures of her beachside shots, in particular, convey an atmosphere of prolonged hedonism, offset by a coiled energy which seems ready to burst her subjects straight out of the frame and into our living rooms. This series of work captures ‘images of beach goers as mirrored in the wet sand, textured by the changing ocean and light’ and is inspired by Trust’s interest in the idea of the ‘blending of man and the natural world’.

Australian illustrator Moofus is just 11 years old. As he says, ‘my mum and dad won’t let me leave school to get a proper job, so I draw lots of pictures’. This limited edition print of Sydney’s Coogee Beach is printed on Epson heavyweight matt paper with archival inks and is just US$20 through the Lost At E Minor store.

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