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Canberra Today 24°/29° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Exuberant and powerful’ exhibition of Megalo posters

THOSE who say Canberra doesn’t have a soul need to visit this exuberant and powerful exhibition.

The Whitewash Of The Year, 1981 by David Morrow
The Whitewash Of The Year, 1981 by David Morrow

Megalo was established in 1981 as a co-operative, barely surviving on shoe-string grants from the then federal government before Canberra had self-government.

Around 150 posters from the Megalo archive cover a long wall in the main space at the Belconnen Arts Space, many taking viewers back to its roots. I find it both depressing and scary that so many of the posters cover issues just as relevant today as they were then: homelessness, youth unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, violence against women and Aboriginal rights. Others are promotional posters for long lost arts organisations and their activities and venues, such as Café Boom Boom, Performing Arts Café, and Skylark Puppet theatre, and Bitumen River Gallery.

Posters have been used in Australia for over 100 years, often to promote arts events, and since the 1960s to raise social issues and have been a rich ground for artists to earn money through their design and printing. As was common, most are unsigned and lack the year of production. The number of digits in phone numbers helps put the poster into a date range, and we know that many designers moved onto significant careers in the visual arts.

It appears that the immediacy and spontaneity brought by screen-printed posters is being revived. They are quick, relatively inexpensive and they competed commercially with more traditional forms of printing.

The posters on display remind us that streets are often art galleries, and that Megalo played – and continues to play – a highly significant role in the visual arts and politics in Canberra.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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