Artist Talk | IT’S CURTAINS!

Tango Conway

Saturday 14 November 2026
3:30 - 4:30pm
Platform
Free | All welcome

Join us for discussion with artist Tango Conway and Acting Curator and Program Manager of Canberra Contemporary, Eliott June O’Dowd. Discover the ideas, themes and processes explored in Tango’s exhibition and inform your viewing of It’s Curtains!

This exhibition playfully explores the parallels between drawing and theatre. Drawing on the idiom “it’s curtains for you/me!”, which signals both the final curtain of a play and the end of something, Conway uses this wordplay to contemplate inevitable finality.

Borrowing from theatrical props and tropes such as footlights, vaudeville hooks and curtains, Conway treats Platform as a stage from which to probe the precarious nature of being an artist. On one hand, there is the persistent demand that “the show must go on”. On the other, there is the looming dread of reaching an end point, of being finished or used up.

While this feeling may stem from any number of concerns that persistently hang over an artist’s head, Conway is less interested in identifying their causes than in exploring how they are felt. It’s Curtains! dwells in the anticipation of failure, holding the tension between the compulsion to keep making and the possibility that the curtain might fall.

Image: Tango Conway, courtesy the artist.