JOHN SAINT MICHEL
Round and Round, 2024
Wool, cotton, glass
50 × 50 × 50 cm
Photography: Jana Langhorst
HOSTING PARTNER
** WARDLOW II **
** INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF MOVING IMAGE **
** WARDLOW II ** ** INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF MOVING IMAGE **
Current Exhibition - Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives
WARDLOW II
21 -28 February 2025
Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives is not a celebration, but a critique of cultural identity. The exhibition examines the complex relationships between admiration and resistance, spectacle and subversion, heritage and rebellion. Through a compelling selection of installations, sculptures, and portraits, it confronts the enduring influence of British culture—its rituals, contradictions, and legacies.
Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives critiques British cultural identity, exploring the tensions between colonial histories and modern-day cultural inheritance. Featuring a series of works by eight diverse artists, the exhibition includes sculptures, paintings, and garments, challenging cycles of memory, trauma, and transformation, while offering a critical view of the empire's mythology.
Installations include works by Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, Comme des Garçons, and Martin Margiela deepening the conversation, between fashion and art.
The exhibition contrasts polished British influence with raw, untamed landscapes, highlighting the empire’s enduring impact. Curated by John Saint Michel (Bowerbird Showspace) and hosted by Wardlow II, Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives invites viewers to reconsider colonial legacies and the complexities of British identity.
Artists
Victoria Todorov
Victoria Todorov is a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist working across installation, video, sculpture, and painting. Influenced by online subcultures and the intersection of digital spaces with the art world, her work explores the fluid boundaries between self and other, woman and machine, nature and technology. Using garish palettes and chaotic compositions, she blends found text, collage, and figural elements to critique the imagery overload of technocapitalism.
Infused with humor and sharp critique, her practice interrogates performativity, accessibility, and failure, reflecting tensions between public personas and private emotions. Collecting cultural artifacts from media spectacles and internet subcultures, her work has been recently been exhibited in a show entitled - ‘Image Economies’ at Monash University and ‘Uppers’ at Woollahra Gallery.
Painting: Generation X , 2022
Oil on Canvas.
John Saint Michel
Artist/Curator Anglo-mania: Shifting Perspectives
John Saint Michel (b. 1983, Melbourne, Australia) is an artist, filmmaker, curator, and writer known for his poetic, gothic aesthetic. Dividing his time between Melbourne and Paris, his multidisciplinary practice spans installation, garment-making, film, and traditional techniques like painting and screen-printing. By weaving industrial remnants, handcrafted materials, and cultural artifacts, he reimagines the intersection of the utilitarian and symbolic, challenging conventional notions of identity and value in the context of industrialism, history, and modernity.
An archivist and collector, Saint Michel works with materials that embody opposing forces—some reflecting hyper-capitalist efficiency, others bearing the marks of care, fragility, and poetry. His installations and films explore order and entropy, permanence and decay, inviting audiences to question the authenticity and value of cultural and industrial materials. As a curator, he has orchestrated exhibitions featuring figures like Joseph Beuys and Martin Margiela, fostering dialogue on the evolution of art and its role in shaping collective narratives.
Sculpture: Shrouds for passiontide, 2022
Cotton, wool.
Photograph: Elizabeth McInnes
Elizabeth McInnes
Elizabeth McInnes is a Melbourne-based arts facilitator, consultant, curator, and artist. Her practice explores expanded curatorial methods, institutional critique, and sculptural assemblages made from recycled materials, focusing on the hidden narratives within everyday objects.
In 2020, she founded Discordia Gallery, a platform for experimental contemporary art and discourse in Melbourne. Previously, she established Conch Rotterdam (2017), a nomadic gallery and experimental publishing initiative across Northern Europe.
For Anglomania: Shifting perspectives, McInnes presents Midas Avarice, a still-life series crafted entirely from discarded materials, transforming waste into symbols of domestic abundance. Her work highlights sustainability, reimagining consumer culture’s obsession with luxury through playful, surreal compositions. McInnes has exhibited internationally, contributing to conversations on art, sustainability, and material transformation.
Sculpture: Midas Avarice, 2025
Paper, acrylic.
Photography: Jack Younger
Molly Younger
Molly Younger is a Melbourne-based designer and artist exploring innovative methods in fashion, sculpture, and design.
A graduate of RMIT’s Fashion Design program, her practice focuses on material experimentation, including handmade natural latex luggage cast from plaster molds and garments bonded with latex layers instead of seams.
Younger’s work blends craftsmanship and innovation, creating tactile, one-of-a-kind objects that challenge design conventions.
Picture: Dartmoor Walk, 2024 (Original photograph by Jack Younger)
1280 x 1020
Natural Latex.
Photography: Jack Younger
Samuel Nugent
Samuel Nugent (b.1997) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Melbourne/Naarm.
Interested in psychology and intimacy – Nugent borrows heavily from their autobiography to create immersive installations, intricately detailed paintings and uncanny sculptures. Through the utilisation of fantasy, role-play and theatricality,
Nugent examines their performance of public and private self. They completed their
Bachelor of Fine Art Honours at Victorian College of The Arts (2020). Nugent has been awarded with the Perrin Sculpture Foundry Award (2019) and has exhibited extensively across Australia and abroad.
Sculpture: ‘My Tent’, 2025
Plastic, Kitten litter.
Photography: Jack Younger
Daisy Thornley
Daisy Thornleigh is a fashion photographer and collector whose work blurs the boundary between image and relic. Thornleigh’s photography captures the ephemeral allure of fashion while anchoring it in a narrative of permanence and history. Her compositions are deeply influenced by her personal collection, which features iconic pieces from Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and Comme des Garçons.
Thornleigh’s practice examines the interplay between fashion as a fleeting moment and as a lasting artifact, weaving stories that celebrate its duality. Her work pays homage to the craftsmanship and the cultural weight embedded in garments, creating a dialogue between past and present, object and image. Both her photography and collection serve as testaments to the transformative power of fashion and its ability to resonate across time.
Peter Boyd & Denise Sprynskyj (S!X)
S!X – La Bibliothèque – "No More Archive" is a presentation by the renowned Australian design house S!X, founded by Peter Boyd and Denise Sprynskyj.
This installation showcases a selection of garments from their Bibliothèque, a collection that features iconic pieces by some of the most influential designers in avant-garde fashion, including Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Carol Christian Poell, and Issey Miyake.
Photography: Jack Younger
Garment: Comme des Garçons fall/winter 2003.
Connor Albert Murphy
Connor Albert Murphy is an Australian artist of Dutch-Scottish heritage whose work delves into themes of ancestral lineage and providence. Through his practice, Murphy weaves together the threads of his heritage, exploring the deep connections between the intersectionality of culture and the iconography that bridges the two.
His sculpture ‘The Land of Many Waters’ serves as an investigation of his ancestral roots, examining how these lineages intertwine with historical cycles and symbology, marking moments within the continuum of prophecy,
Murphy offers an evocative narrative that transcends time. His work invites viewers into a world where the echoes of the past reverberate through time, connecting personal identity with universal truths.
Photography: Jack Younger
Andrew Hustwaite
Andrew Hustwaite holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Melbourne University, 2006) and an Hons BFA (Monash University, 2010). His practice explores human-machine relationships through kinetic sculptures, play, and risk, drawing on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. He has launched sculptures into the Sturt Stony Desert, created propositional Space Junk, and examines labor’s arbitrary value.
Since 2017, he has collaborated with Swiss dance company Antipode Danse Tanz, integrating kinetic sculptures with contemporary dance. His work invites audiences to rethink space, technology, and utopian possibilities through experimentation and play.
UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Dinner by Carnation Canteen
Chef Audrey Shaw
Culinary influences: Local sourcing, French, Mediterranean and English,
Location: WARDLOW II
Audrey Shaw, the culinary talent behind Fitzroy’s Carnation Canteen, is known for her refined yet approachable approach to food. With experience in renowned kitchens like River Cafe and Tedesca Osteria, Shaw emphasizes seasonal, locally sourced ingredients in her creative dishes.
For this intimate dinner of 25 guests at Wardlow II, Shaw will present a menu that reflects her signature style—elegant, inventive, and community-focused. Her attention to detail and storytelling through food will immerse guests in the vibrant spirit of Fitzroy’s dining culture.
A curated selection of cocktails, inspired by Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives, will complement the meal, blending classic British influences with seasonal Australian ingredients and creative twists.
Presented alongside Anglomania: Shifting Perspectives, an exhibition curated by Bowerbird Showspace.
Featured Painting:
Pieter Claesz Berchem, Belgium 1597 – 1660/1661 Haarlem)
Oil on panel: 88 x 64 cm
1640
Cocktails feature: NIKKA single malt mikyago and NIKKA coffey gin