Bela Lugosi and the Plot’s Twist @ One Star Lounge and Gallery

May 22 - June 1st 2025

Bela Lugosi and the Plot’s Twist is an exhibition spawned at the collapse of certainty and dread, reflecting on the inevitability of mortality and the ways we mythologise death and absence as omni-present.

Central to the exhibition is the haunting figure of Bela Lugosi, whose portrayal of Dracula on the stage and film became inseparable from his identity, culminating in his famous wish to be buried in his Dracula cape. Bauhaus's 1982 goth rock anthem Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the soundtrack for this exhibition’s theme of death, longing, and the blurred lines between an artist’s identity and the speculative myths surrounding an artists death, defined oeuvre and subsequent value. While examining death as an end, the end, the exhibition also examines death as a state of emotional and psychological suspension, capturing the interplay of history, memory, dread, humour, sublimation, desire, and the unknown.

Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror classic Dracula conveys its story through a dossier of documents, a compilation of accounts sourced from multiple narrators including observant diary entries, business and personal letters, real estate transactions, commercial receipts, public records, and newspaper clippings reporting on strange events. This exhibition borrows this epistolary structure where the artworks can be story-telling artefacts, where the viewer is an investigator, and the One Star Lounge Gallery is the setting for unexpected plot twists. Assembled the artworks' amass historical visual and material references with a lens on death as an unpredictable narrative we all face in our own lives.

Organised by Elvis Richardson
Lisa Young
Edward Parritt
Sarah Goffman
Ev Morris
Stephen Jones
Zamara Zamara
Mark Hislop
Toni Louise
Siying Zhou
Phuong Ngo
Angela Brennan
Claire Lambe
Beau Emmett
Ronnie Van Hout
Chunxiao Qu
Samantha Vawdrey
Lucy Griggs
Julie Davies
Elvis Richardson
Michael Needham
Benjamin T. Alfred
Piers Greville
Sadie Chandler

One Star Lounge and Gallery on Instagram ︎︎︎   

Performance Artist 4EVA︎

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, this major new commission emerged from an invitation to unpack the rich repositories of the Performance Space archive.

ABOVE: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - Silk scarf 65x65cms Fundraising commission for Performance Space 2023 Photo: Tania Vukicevic.



Oct 19 2023: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - digital mural installed at Carraigeworks for Future40 @ Performance Space Liveworks Festival 2023. Photo: Document Photography courtesy of Performance Space.

Oct 19 2023: PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4 EVA︎ - digital mural installed at Carraigeworks for Future40 & Liveworks @ Performance Space Liveworks Festival 2023. Photo by Document Photography courtesy of Performance Space.

Performance Artist 4EVA︎
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham for Performance Space 2023

‘Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories,’ wrote Walter Benjamin in Unpacking My Library (1931). Naarm-based artist Elvis Richardson is passionate about collecting and collections, creating installations that probe the ethics, politics and poetics of institutional collections as reconstituted artistic readymades. One of her landmark archive projects, the blog CoUNTess est. 2008, and since 2017 the collaborative project Countess Report publishes data on gender representation in the Australian contemporary art world as both art and advocacy using the language of institutional critique.

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, this major new commission emerged from an invitation to Elvis Richardson to unpack the rich repositories of the Performance Space archive. Following an extensive creative research residency among these analogue and digital records, Elvis has created a site-specific wall work that celebrates and remembers generations of artists and their work. A celebration of our shared history, PERFORMANCE ARTIST 4EVA♡ unleashes a four-decade force of chaotic memories. It is a tribute to the mnemonic monuments comprising a history of creative experimentation and the evolving typographic styles that shape it.

Elvis says: ‘With this commission, I was keen to see what happens when each invitation, advertisement, poster and press release in the archive is treated like an ‘exquisite corpse’ of text and imagery connecting generations of legendary artists and their work. The images and word associations I am assembling from the PSpace goldmine of printed matter are impressed with the promises of so many incredible stories, and I want this work to exhibit the anticipation and bodily presence unique to performance.’

Text by Daniel Mudie Cunningham (from the Performance Space Website)

Art Problems

“A number of years ago I agreed to take part in a long term study of gambling practices in Victoria. I would get a phone call every six months or so asking me the same questions. While answering I thinakfully reflected I didn’t have a traditional gambling problem in the way they survey was targeting, but if they had been asking me about the financial risks I take being an artist I am certain I would have been scoring off the charts.

The pervading myths and stereotypes of the artist have always been economic whether they are starving in garrets or selling their work for outlandish prices – art is a con, seducing artists and the public alike with its snake oil charms of access to freedom, self-expression, genius, talent, unconventional lifestyles, beauty, taste, infamy and status.”

ART PROBLEMS has appeared in exhibitions in various formats prior to these affordable screen prints being printed by Spacecraft Studios in 2017 in an edition of 50 in 2020 with a new design and edition of 50. 

‘ART PROBLEMS’ EDITIONS FOR PURCHASE ︎︎︎   

Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson
screen print on cotton 1400x1100mm

The artists Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson have adopted a curatorial pose to collaborate on a series of magazine covers, combining portraiture with attention-seeking headlines for a so-far fictional publication FEMMO™. Where other curators might select, arrange and present tangible and digital objects in galleries, the editors of FEMMO™ have organised indexical text objects on a (very big) page.

FEMMO™ promises articles its producers would like to read. FEMMO™ imagines a world where feminism is central to, and informs, every topic. In particular FEMMO™ has fun with the artworld’s gender biased status-quo. The National Library of Australia declined to issue FEMMO™ with an International Standard Serial Number because it had “no content”. FEMMO™ disagrees. FEMMO™ is joining the surface litter of Australian art history.

From melted trophies resilvered in The Impossibility of Losing in the Mind of Someone Winning 2008 to upscaled trophy embelishments in Rose Window awarded the 2014 ROI Art Prize and geometric trophy shapes rendered in aggregated polished pigmented concrete. The meanings and representations of the trophy remain of enduring interest.