LOWBROW
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LOWBROW •
One of three annual fundraising shows, Queer Heirlooms at Unassigned Gallery is also their third annual collaborative exhibition with Queer Love Collective. This year, featuring 100 artists on the dot, the exhibition explores memory and heritage, looking at what meaning we make and how we pass it on. The exhibition spans about every art form you can imagine – including the written word and medieval weapons made out of fabric – contains multitudes in how expansively “heirloom” was interpreted. The more I explored the exhibition, both on opening night and on a more relaxed weekday return, the grouping of works by loose theme seemed to pop out. There were explorations of kink, of queer labelling, sexual exploration, online worlds, fandom, and queer history among many others. In an open call exhibition, the breadth of work and skill is bound to vary, but three categories - photography, fibre arts, and the proliferation of renaissance adjacent imagery - stood out above the crowd.
If you read my writing on Held, Altered at No Vacancy a couple weeks ago, you’ll know I had tried to go to Bus Projects, but the world was truly against me getting there. Maybe I should have taken that as a sign, but alas I tried again this week, and actually managed to make it in to see us as stars, as horses. Featuring work by Sophie Coe, the show is a collaboration with Kamilaroi curator Tabitha Glanville.
So here I am breaking the No Vacancy ban to write about Held, Altered featuring Grace Mitchell, Indya Pearce and Keely Vermalis. And I’m so glad that I’ve ended up here writing about this show, because I’m so pleasantly surprised how well these three artists work together in this space. At first glance, the through line between the work seems precarious. But spending time with the work in the space, I’m convinced. These works speak to each other through memory and time, and it almost feels like I’m walking into a private conversation being held between the artists.
I haven’t had many reasons to venture out west from my inner north bubble in the years I’ve been living in Melbourne, and I’m well aware of how much of a shame that is – especially as this was my very first time visiting the institution that is Trocadero Projects. There are currently three separate shows filling the gallery space which I had the joy of exploring before buying heading round the corner to pick up the weirdest assortment of groceries from Cheaper Buy Miles; Tent Theory by Hunter Smith, We live by inference from the Saluhan Collective and Discovering human-nature by Lan Anh Truong.
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Found objects, glass in fully saturated colours, and steel frames unite Dinette by Kostas Pavlidis, currently on show at Strawberry Gallery in Brunswick. Though I make a point to go in and see what the gallery has in store for me each time they pop up with something new, this is the first show I have seen from Pavlidis since his inclusion at Strawberry’s Spring1883 showing in 2025. Strawberry feels uniquely apt for this work. Both the show and the gallery seem to be held together by sheer force (the front wall of Strawberry consistently feels like a feat of engineering; Pavlidis’ works held together by welding).