LOWBROW
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LOWBROW •
Blindside is a mainstay of the Melbourne art scene. We’ve covered it multiple times from the inception of Lowbrow. The gallery found a home in the Nicholas building for years, and has recently bade farewell to the space, with its big windows and temperamental elevators, and moved to 54 Errol Street - a City of Melbourne owned shopfront in North Melbourne. The new space is long and narrow; it clearly had a former life as a family home attached to a shopfront. It's a space that calls for creativity in exhibition design in order to make full use of the long hallways and somewhat incongruous spaces. Chokehold was the inaugural exhibition: a one day photographic show, with a panel discussion and, of course, a peep show in the new back garden. This show is also a return and a goodbye for Sherburn - part of the Blindside team for many years, who stepped away at the end of last year. In their own words: “I’m very confident in how this is really the much needed future step for such a significant, heritage form of an artist-run space.”
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never been to Off The Kerb before. The pay to play gallery model that Off the Kerb and other galleries like it use (PG Printmaker, fortyfivedownstairs, Brunswick Street Gallery, SOL) has perplexed me since I was in art school; not quite a commercial gallery, not quite an ARI, but a secret third thing that hovers between the two. Yet, they do hold an important place in the community for those ready to exhibit their work, but not in the stable of a commercial gallery. Their current exhibition, Summer Daze, is under the umbrella of Midsumma festival - Melbourne’s LQBTQIA+ arts and culture festival that plays out across the city through January and February.
I snuck into SOL Gallery just as the opening for SOULS was wrapping up. Group Show SOULS is on as part of Midsumma Festival 2026, which, as they put it, is Victoria’s premier festival of LGBTQIA+ arts and culture. I struggled to find info about how involved Midsumma was in the show, or if this show has been presented by SOL Gallery specifically. I couldn’t see who curated the show. Or even how these artists came to be involved; was it invitational or via submission? But at the end of the day the details don’t matter. As this was a stellar line up featuring a range of LGBTQIA+ artists that together present a show that celebrates queer identity and community, and feels joyful in doing so. As such, it feels a fitting part of the Midsumma festival.
The current show at Assembly Point has been curated by Lani Seligman & Kiron Robinson, and it moves in relative silence. Heralded by the title of the show ‘masterpiece’, the artists, and curators are named, but no other information is present on the scene. The works themselves aren’t credited individually, there’s no exhibition text, and there’s nothing online I could find about the show. After being initially frustrated about this, as it’s admittedly a bit hard to write about art when you know nothing about it, I came round to liking the lack of information (although I did message one of the artists eventually, just to find out whose work is whose). It allows the work to speak for itself, and feels more like public art than any formal kind of exhibition.
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George Paton Gallery is currently hosting two solo shows; Translucences by Soyo Paek and Purity and Danger by Leena O’Luu. The gallery, situated in the University of Melbourne’s Arts and Culture building at the Parkville campus, is run by the university’s student union (UMSU). Work is chosen via a proposals process and only current Uni Melb students can apply. George Paton gallery fills a strange niche at the university, in that it doesn’t feel like a student gallery, and that it’s so separate from UniMelb’s Southbank VCA campus - which is where all of the creative arts students are situated. George Paton feels more aligned with the professional side of the university, rather than the student side, even though it’s definitely student work on display.