THE Aussie bloke has been replaced by the Aussie lad, as new generations of young men struggle to find identity in the mixed messages on social media, says artist Wade Taylor. Designer brands, hair styling and male cologne are at odds with the meat pies, VB and football of past generations of “blokes”, he says.…

YOU can do just about anything on your mobile phone these days, including it seems, record an album that leads to sell-out shows and rave radio reviews. No-one was more surprised at the results than Rob Snarski (ex Chad’s Tree), who started recording songs on his phone as part of a crowd-funding project to raise…

EDGY theatre is bread and butter for The Blue Room in Northbridge and All That Glitters tackles the issue of asylum seekers and detention centres. “Our fellow humans, those we recognise as people — and those we don’t, live in continual fear and face the danger of violent death, and we are powerless to help…

O Menino e O Mundo—The Boy and the World. The Latino film festival is in full swing and is holding a free night August 30 for you to dip your toe in with a free screening of the Venezuelan film Libertador. The festival’s also holding Perth’s first ever Latin short film competition which got more…

NORTH PERTH’S Marcella Polain has won an international poetry prize for her triptych on love and loss. Dr Polain was one of 48 international poets invited to the 19th Festival Curtea de Arges Festival in Romania. “The poems Still and Turn are about the complexities of love, and the poem Silence is about grief,” she…

A FOREST of poets will sprout across the Northbridge Piazza, as part of this year’s Poetry Festival, which kicks off August 13. A live installation on August 16 invites people to wander through a word performance, festival co-organiser Peter Jeffery says: “Poets stand like trees—you go up and they will recite one poem endlessly.” The academic…

CHANCES are you’ve seen Daek William’s art: his metres-high murals boldly emblazon buildings around Perth. The 31-year old admits to having committed graffiti in his misbegotten youth, “but I was more into murals, so I didn’t have that bad-boy attitude… I wasn’t very good at it”. For 10 weeks William’s locked the door of his…

PLAYS where the understudy upstages the star are legend, but what about being called in cold with just a couple of days to learn your lines? Like the spirits her character Madame Arcati conjures during a seance, Alison van Reeken rose to the occasion when replacing Roz Hammond, who’d stepped aside due to illness. Popping…

DRAMATIC black curtains frame the entrance to PICA’s Northbridge galleries, where demonic-looking sphinxes, eyes flashing menacingly, guard the 2015 salon series, Epic Narratives. Curators Leigh Robb and Nadia Johnson broke with traditional gallery exhibition format, to add a sense of theatre to the art, kicking off with Tarryn Gill’s “guardians” at the door. The artist…

NORTH PERTH photographer Brad Serls’ last exhibition Houses of 6006 explored the tiny details and hidden places often ignored in the homes of his suburb’s well-trodden streets. For his new collection, Lurking, the 35-year-old has taken his passion for detail to the “weird little places” in some of Europe’s greatest cities. From the tallest point…