Exhibition

6 – 22 August at Next Wave

Art is not going to help this town is a love letter to family, car trips, suburban housing estates and train stations. Reflecting on the ways that housing and travel infrastructure shape our lives, Rachel Morley and her family recreate their shared memories of Melbourne’s western suburbs through a series of short films on super 8.

Through the use of “old” film technology, nostalgia is employed as a means to shift the common narrative of outer suburban life. What is often labelled as an underprivileged and under-resourced region is viewed instead through the artist’s rose-coloured childhood memories. It’s cool to do donuts in the carpark with your dad, to do a drive-by and spy on the old house with your mum. With love and admiration at its core, this project draws connections between identity, behaviour and infrastructure through the lens of familial relationships.

The title Art isn’t going to help this town is taken from a Facebook comment by a local resident of Wyndham City Council. It encapsulates the anxiety felt by many in outer western suburbs communities, faced with the overwhelming problem of current infrastructure straining under an influx of new residents. Rachel appropriates the sentiment with irony, acknowledging that while art won’t fix these problems it can still change our approach to them.

Where Rachel’s previous work has been critical of suburbia, this project quietly acknowledges those observations before pushing them aside to celebrate familial love and the ways it enables us to navigate the structures that define our world.

Rachel Morley is an artist and arts worker from the outer western suburbs of Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. Through analogue photography, film and photo-collage, her practice explores relationships to place and the construction of memory.

Drawing on her experiences growing up, her past photographic works reflect on how power and inequality is created both within housing and through urban planning in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs. She is currently exploring how familial relationships, behaviours and identities are shaped by suburban environments and infrastructure.

Rachel has presented works in public spaces; hanging from rooftops, pasted onto bridges, and beamed from an LED light screen installed above a house. She has held solo gallery exhibitions at Analogue Academy (2022) and The Annex (2023), and her photographic work Housing should not be for profit was shortlisted for the 2023 Wyndham Art Prize. Rachel is an alumna of Next Wave’s 2024-25 Kickstart Residency program.