The Little Machine. 27 Aug 2025
Initially backed by the Adelaide Renew rent-free initiative, in January 2023, Eleen Deprez and Michael Newall opened the Little Machine Gallery in Adelaide’s Regent Arcade – a space dedicated to prioritising ambitious, ideas-driven exhibitions predominantly by South Australian artists, but also extending national and international exchanges.
For the reopening (in a larger shopfront) in May this year, and with support from the City of Adelaide, Deprez and Newall orchestrated a group exhibition that included every artist—a remarkable 45 artists and 95 works—who had previously exhibited with them. Viewing works in Soft Return—by a veritable roll-call of South Australian artists over the last few decades—it was immediately evident that TLM represents a valuable addition to Adelaide's visual art landscape.
Partial installation view: L-R: Polixeni Papapetrou, The Watcher, (2009); Deborah Paauwe, Evenings Edge 1 & 3 (2021); Kasia Töns, Ronisconi (2024); Gerwyn Davies, Spilt Milk from Bel Air (2017) Photo: Sam Roberts
Polished, in-depth essays accompany every exhibition in modest catalogues that contain unambiguous floor plans and lists of works (indispensable for all viewers, especially reviewers). Programming of events is wide-ranging and has featured live performances; a well-attended open forum on the future direction(s) of contemporary art; magazine launches; artist talks; poetry readings and even a Make Music Day. On 31 August, TLM will stage their inaugural Birth of the Reader event – a reading group inspired by Deprez’s attendance at a table read last year at Beyond Baroque, a literary arts centre in Venice, Los Angeles.
Asked about audience input at the open forum, Deprez says: “The reflections shared really affirmed our focus on being experimental and discursive. Multiple people affirmed the unique space we provide, which fills a gap in between Adelaide’s art institutions.” Notably, TLM’s expansive vision extends to artists at varying stages of practice; Jingwei Bu and Marian Sandberg, for example, who were co-recipients of the 2024 Visual Arts Critics Circle emerging artist award, both participated in Soft Return.
And so, to Prosopon, which is the Greek word for mask; in ancient Greek theatre actors typically wore masks with exaggerated facial expressions to indicate their characters’ emotional states. “It’s curious, and perhaps telling,” Deprez and Newall state in their catalogue essay, “that our word person derives from this – not from any revelation of our true self, but from the roles we play, the appearances we present, the masks we wear.”
In this tightly curated exhibition, TLM delivers a selection of (appropriately performative) photographic images, which reveals some of the multifaceted masking strategies employed by contemporary photo-based artists.
Winner in 2023 of the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, photographic artist, performer/costumier Davies has devised innovative, sometimes startling, means of self-disguise, which go beyond mere masquerade. In his overtly humorous self-portraiture, identity is obscured, the body vastly inflated; disguise or armour? The amusingly kitsch form of an oversized pineapple, for instance, belies the seriousness of Davies’ socio-political commentary. Take Spilt Milk from Bel Air (2017), in which his spikily golden persona is pictured on a barren roadside, clutching a plastic shopping bag. Included in the frame is an abandoned supermarket trolley and a plastic container of spilt milk. It’s an effectively economical allusion to both the environmentally destructive overuse of plastic packaging and the plight of farmers struggling to make a living in the dairy industry.
Throughout her career, Deborah Paauwe has navigated the frequently challenging transitional terrain between girlhood and adulthood, employing a catalogue of extraordinarily inventive strategies—from partial framing to swathes of long hair—to obscure the identity of her female subjects. In 2024, she was awarded the Wai Tang Commissioning Prize (part of the prestigious Bowness Photographic Prize) for her work The other twin (2024).
From the beginning, the siting of her performative tableaux within unmistakably interior domestic spaces established a contextual framework from which she has never wavered. Yet two of the images in Prosopon – Evenings Edge 1 and 3 (2021) – reveal an unexpected departure from several of Paauwe’s signature devices. Photographed (for the first time) at night, a young woman is seated outdoors in an overgrown garden and although she wears a half-mask, the eyes are clearly visible, as are her nose, mouth and chin. In other words, most unusually, the gaze is reciprocal. Unlike earlier more decorative masks or jaunty ribbons and bows, this half-mask is a crude, moulded plastic item with blonde hair and an absurd pink bow. Notably, the sitter is solitary, without the support of the nurturing friend/sister/co-conspirator or mother figure we’ve come to expect in Paauwe’s work. She seems resigned, even disconsolate, her vintage dress worn and rather ill-fitting. “It’s as though the performance of girlhood,” Deprez and Newall suggest in their catalogue essay, “has hardened into ritual: exhausted or outgrown.” Is this sitter expressing regret at the passing of childhood innocence? The image is a reminder that within Paauwe’s fictionalised worlds, small, all-too-human bodily imperfections—beauty rendered mortal—have always acted as indicators of the gap between fantasy and reality. It’s a gulf that Paauwe regards as important in any reading of her work – “the distance that separates us from perfection lying in each bruise, scar and stain.”
The mostly small-scale works in Prosopon by the late Polixeni Papapetrou (1960–2018) are artist proofs of larger editioned works. As it happens, each of the five images is from a different post-2008 series and the reduced scale is compatible with the vignettes Papapetrou created at that time. Around 2006, she made a landmark shift from studio images of readymade narratives (such as Wonderland, 2004) – ornately realised with scenic backdrops, painted by her art critic husband Robert Nelson. Henceforth, initially inspired by the lost child paintings of Frederick McCubbin, Papapetrou began to cast her narratives in the Australian landscape.
In her 2011 series The Dreamkeepers, she further extended the animal/human hybridity of Between Worlds (2009-2012), in which children had adopted a variety of animal masks. That remarkable series prompted a preoccupation with ambiguity, with the blurring of identity and boundaries, facilitated by the wearing of masks. Importantly, the removal of facial expressions, greatly heightens the significance of body language and gesture. The Lighthouse Keepers (2011) depicts a stalwart group of three diminutive figures—one of whom occupies an antique perambulator—wearing aged masks and crude blonde wigs. There’s a disjuncture throughout the series between youthful, unmarked bodies and their almost grotesque, wrinkled visages. Nonetheless, The Dreamkeepers, in which all the players have curious occupations—The Wave Counter, The Joy Pedlars—is captivating. Imbued with a sense of innocence, the lighthouse keepers occupy an unknowable world that is their own – their gaze is directed away from the camera towards the ocean.
It was after the birth of her daughter Olympia—a future muse and active collaborator—that in 2002, Papapetrou began to photograph her children (at her daughter's insistence). This new development set in motion the role playing and the possibilities for transformation, the exposure to children’s boundless imagination, the explosion of colour that would sustain numerous and diverse subsequent series. Given her foundational interest in the work of Diane Arbus, it’s not surprising that Papapetrou did not shrink from confronting difficult content including her own mortality; her legacy is an exceptional body of work, truncated much too soon, distinguished by a clarity of concept and execution.
Brianna Speight’s evocatively titled series Hypersaline Drool—created during a 2022 residency at the British School in Rome—is a calculated cacophony of the animate and inanimate. Carefully constructed theatrical assemblages and dis-assemblages—of painted body parts, folds and architectural forms and props—recur across the series. Speight and her veiled collaborators interact with fabrics and props in a visual essay to the corporeal – a surreal evocation of the messiness of the human body. For Speight, the images represent “portraits of a kind, reframing past experiences and emotional residues.” They therefore exist as records of “emotional weather” to borrow Adrian Searle’s expression in a review of the work of Louise Bourgeois – Abstract Erotic is currently showing at London’s Courtauld Gallery. Speight has undertaken an ambitious project, vividly realised with sculptural layerings and drapings of diaphanous/opaque fabrics in discordant hues of fleshy pink and absinthe green. Incursions of natural grasses and the occasional seepage or drool of viscous turquoise paint, hint at her environmental concerns.
Darker in mood and palette, Kasia Töns’ masks—from the series Martha leaves (2024)—were created more than a decade ago during a challenging period in her life. In a redemptive action, for Prosopon, she assigned each of these masks—stitched and constructed from recycled materials—reminiscent of those in shamanic cultures to particular friends. The resultant images, photographed in atmospheric landscapes, are striking; ungoverned by neat frames, the standout works are the digital prints on canvas, in which the open weave of applied fabrics, permits a glimpse of Töns’ collaborators. A black-robed figure—barely discernible in a nocturnal woodland setting—seems to yield to a towering, textured mask-cum-headdress, the colour of yellow ochre. Their impact, perhaps not immediate on initial viewing, grows and lingers.
Alice McCool and Yusuf Ali Hayat have wrought a Neapolitan transformation of the laneway-like Cabinet space at the rear of Little Machine. The focal point of their collaborative project 3–5–2 (2025) is the legendary Argentinian football player Diego Maradona, who played for S.S.C. Napoli. Strands of fairy lights, a mural and a significant number (eleven) of carefully positioned photographs—taken in the streets of Naples—contribute to McCool and Hayat’s devotional installation. A central shrine, flanked by pedestals, features Hayat’s image of a Maradona mosaic discovered in Naples – awash with photo-worthy examples of Maradona worship (the colour blue is dominant). We’re accustomed to hearing that football is a religion and certainly adulation for a legendary player like Maradona has assumed religious fervour. (Indeed in 1998, the Church of Maradona (Iglesia Maradoniana) was founded in Rosaria, Argentina). A deified star becomes obliged to perform on and off the field, to cultivate a public persona. The casualty of this level of idolatry is surely the loss of what Deprez and Newall term personhood. Is immortality (as Deprez and Newall seem to infer) compensation? It may be a topic for discussion at 6 pm on Friday 29 August, when TLM will hold a conversation with some of Prosopon’s participating artists – about photography, personhood, disguises, masks and costumes, idolisation, and more.
“Move through the exhibition …” Deprez and Newall urge, and “you will be stared at and seen.” With closer scrutiny, it becomes apparent that the arrangement of the five works in Prosopon’s installation image (see above) is as deliberated as the photographs in McCool and Hayat’s 3–5–2 installation. Paauwe’s two works are hung alongside a considered grouping of other watchers in fluctuating degrees of disguises. In fact, Papapetrou’s nocturne of a girl wearing an owl mask is titled The Watcher (2009). Such attention to detail is indicative of the thoughtfulness that underpins this smaller (in comparison with Soft Return), but rewarding exhibition.
Wendy Walker
When: 26 Jul to 30 Aug
Where: The Little Machine
More info: thelittlemachine.com
Artists in PROSOPON have websites and Instagram accounts: Gerwyn Davies; Alice McCool & Yusuf Ali Hayat; Deborah Paauwe; Polixeni Papapetrou; Brianna Speight; Kasia Töns. NB. polixenipapapetrou.net
More info: Deborah Paauwe, The wayward girls (2025), Wai Tang Commissioning Award exhibition, Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne, 13 September to 9 November
Polixeni Papapetrou, The Lighthouse Keepers,
from the series The Dreamkeepers (2011).
Artist proof (courtesy of a private collection).
