t’s usually in early December that artists and critics are approached by newspapers and magazines to nominate their “exhibition of the year.” I would like to step in early (writing this, as I am, in late September) and state confidently that Susan Jacobs’s , recently installed at Melbourne’s Buxton Contemporary, is my exhibition of 2022. To date, I have visited it five times. Each time it has unfolded new complexities and previously unappreciated layers of meaning. It snakes through the entirety of the museum’s ground floor. At times it morphs into being a dragon, then it becomes a riddle, then a half-dismantled street market formed from vitrines, bollards, flashing lights, bronze casts, meshes, and grids. At all times it has been sympathetically curated by Jacqueline Doughty, who in the exquisite, pocket-sized catalogue gives us useful snapshots into this Sydney-born Australian artist’s materials and methodology: “Playful allusions to science, psychology and mythology,” Doughty writes, “jostle with visual puns and word games… the work is enlivened by the imaginative potential of getting things ‘fruitfully wrong.’” On each of my visits I noticed more and more visual puns, as figures of, 2022, riffs on various forms of headwear,” Doughty tells us. “A perforated rubber cap, used by hairdressers to separate and streak strands of hair, is transformed into a helmet. The distinctive tasselled, black cap worn by university graduates is upturned, attached to a scaffold with a bricklayer’s clamp and filled with a generous dollop of cement – a visual pun on the word ‘mortarboard.’”
