Joshua Reivel and Nicholas Currie are united in Horror Show, an exhibition of new work displayed at Ordinance. 

Refiguring filmic, literary and commodified representations of horror, both artists engage with the felt experiences of horror that shape everyday life - alienation, trauma, loneliness, entrapment, violence and isolation - produced as they are by the physical and non-physical elements of the world around us. 

For Reivel, a suite of works on paper render classic Australian horror from a distance. Scenes from Wake in Fright (1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) lose the soft edges of the filmic frame - the sinister undercurrents that run throughout are exposed and emphasised through their stark representation in pen and ink. The faces within Reivel’s work seem to personify these forces, reminding us of how histories, anxieties and atmospherics become embodied. A becoming-ghoul(ish) without noticing.

For Currie, however, this loses its distance, becoming instead an opportunity to grapple with the ongoing horrors of colonial disturbance, as seven grinning pumpkins look out over the gallery. A strange conga-line, are they witnesses, are they laughing? And if so, is it good natured or maniacal? Are they laughing at how silly the whole australian Gothic thing really is, that we would see the landscape as some malevolent force, when it was us (white people) all along? Orienting the room is Currie’s rendering of the monster from  Frankenstein (1818) — the original Gothic, making an appearance (apparition)?