I missed Mlvyn Minnaar's opening speech, being waylaid by a sudden desire for whisky, but apparently it was pretty hectic. I heard he kinda dissed the show he was supposed to be opening, criticising the traditional nature of the works. I guess he was right, but there were some gems there if you were willing to look for them (I admit I barely got past the first room when I saw a work entitled The I's are the Window to the Soul. Had to dash out for a quick smoke and glass of wine before the rash that induced went away). Portraiture is a pretty hard theme, there are so many shitty and impassioned ideals around what it means. So I think it was quite a brave show from the AVA, but there were definitely no Kendell Geers bottlenecks or anything. There was a cool work by Stuart Bird, which was a bunch of suspended black balaclavas, which were moulded into the forms of anonymous faces. I wonder though if it's placement in the show was intentional -it was in a room with only portraits of black people- because I thought that was a bit funny, and changed the interpretation of the work a little. Linda Stupart's stencil work was cool too... it was a large portrait of everyone's favourite child star Mcauley Caulkin. Spraypainted onto the wall on the top floor, he was ominously spitting over the balcony rail. A little pink heart above his shoulder finished it off: an ode to pathos, desire and delinquency. These were the most daring of the portraits, some of the more traditional ones were nice too but they have mostly slipped my mind now. Oh well.