Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. at ACCA

Loneliness has always had a soundtrack. ACCA’s major winter exhibition borrows its title from two of popular music’s great laments – Hank Williams’s 1949 country heartbreaker and Elvis Presley’s 1960 number-one hit – fusing them into a frame for work that focuses on the present.

Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. runs at ACCA from July 3 to August 30, the first instalment of a new Art and Emotion series (to be followed by Rage in 2027 and Joy in 2029), curated by Sophie Prince and artistic director Myles Russell-Cook. The pair’s curatorial thesis is simple: the antidote to absence is presence. Eleven artists are tasked with making the case.

Melbourne-born Polly Borland, a long-time resident of Los Angeles, is a headline name. Perhaps best known as a portrait photographer – photographing icons from Queen Elizabeth II to musician Nick Cave – she also makes sculptures that embrace ambiguity: biomorphic, flesh-like, uncanny. Her large-scale sculpture BOD (2023) is an obscured human figure whose formal weight conveys what grief and exhaustion actually feel like in the body. Gideon Appah, the Ghanaian painter whose coastal canvases draw on local life in his home country, offer a contrasting yet resonant dialogue. His Swimmers and Surfers series places figures on Ghana’s beaches as though suspended in a dreamy light, offering something like solace against the exhibition’s more anxious frequencies.

Kayla Mattes’s Lonely Planet (2025–2026), a tapestry commissioned for the show, stretches nearly seven metres. Its woven surface is a compendium of memes, screenshots and heartbreak symbols. It is digital culture slowed down to the pace of handicraft. Seth Brown contributes Frank (2024), in which an animatronic hotdog scrolls endlessly through images of bread in search of its perfect bun. It is absurd but somehow also genuinely sad.

In Prince’s words, the show “moves beyond loneliness’s legacy of shame and privacy, openly embracing the tragic, the humorous and the human, and offering a space to see and be seen”. What the 11 artists share is not an aesthetic but a disposition: the willingness to sit, alone, with a feeling long enough to make something new out of it.

Learn more about the upcoming exhibition here.

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