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. 

When I went to Unassigned to have a poke around the In The Making show by Many Hands Make, a pot luck lunch was being packed up. A long table set up in the middle of the gallery was draped in tablecloths and showed the evidence of a meal shared between friends. I’m so enamoured with how many community events are hosted at Unassigned and how eager the community is to connect with these events. From meals like this potluck, to admin monday which turns the gallery into a co-working space, to fundraisers like Lesbian Mud Wrestling, or the weekly life drawing sessions that are about to start back up. Unassigned is such an important part of the emerging artist community and shows like In The Making prove that even further. 

The end of the year always makes me a bit emotional. I’m someone who is sappy and sentimental at the best of times, and there is truly no better occasion to be so than a time of year which calls for us to be reflective.

I remember a conversation in probably 2020 or 2021 with my best friend, Lotte, about making a combined site where I reviewed art and she reviewed theatre. So clearly Lowbrow has been a thought at the back of my head for a long time, even though it only came to fruition this year. This all started as a project for my Masters, and I think I needed the push from that formal structure in order to finally put pen to paper and start writing. This article is fittingly timed as I graduated that Masters degree this week, and you know what - I will put in a photo of me in cap and gown because a) I look excellent b) I’m proud of myself and c) I never got to have a graduation ceremony for my undergrad bc I was a 2020 covid grad. Please, for your viewing pleasure, enjoy this photo of Charlotte and I sweating though our polyester in Wednesday afternoon’s heat. And yes I did refuse to take off my silly little hat for the rest of the day.

In lieu of a review this week, I’m looking back at some of the art that stuck with me this year. I won’t lie to you and say these are all strictly things covered for Lowbrow or Lowbrow-esque (the AGNSW was my first gallery of the year), but they are my picks, and I am inherently lowbrow. Please enjoy my top 11 picks from 2025 in chronological order (of course I couldn’t whittle it down to just 10).

January 3: Just like drops in time, nothing by Ernesto Neto at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The installation of this 2002 work overtook my senses. For the first time in my life, I smelled an artwork before seeing it. The stockings, filled with spices poured onto the floor, overtaking the space with their smell and colour. Having just been in San Francisco at the SFMoMA days before, I was immediately reminded of Ruth Asawa’s sculptures in the shape and feel of Neto’s installation.

Round 2 of the RMIT grad shows left a lot to be desired. For whatever reason, most works felt like I had seen them before, not in the sense that they felt warmly familiar, but that I was being shown the same exhibition time and again. I’ll also admit I had higher expectations for this post-graduate exhibition. I generally liked most of the work, but not much of it jumped out to me as favourites. Lots of it blended into each other. This could be due to grad show fatigue of sorts? Seeing so much graduating student work in such a short amount of time, it’s impossible to not compare it all to each other. 

The thing that stuck out to me about the 2025 VCA grad showwas theswathes of space each artist had. Some had whole walls, others had whole rooms. It definitely seemed like each grad had probably about four times the amount of room that each of the RMIT students had in their recent grad show install. I heard through the grapevine (gossiping with other ex-students I ran into) that the painting department only had 20 graduating students this year, in comparison to 35 last year. Considering the starting cohort sits around 40 students, this is a huge drop out rate. This is a trend across all departments (although painting definitely has the biggest difference in numbers), which makes me wonder why exactly the drop out rate was so high for the class of 2025.

I went into the MADA Grad Show with no expectations. The campus is foreign to me, I don’t know any of the grads, and the people I know who go to Monash are in the music department. I was blown away. Given all the artists are BFAs or Honours, and my somewhat chaotic experience of the RMIT show, I expected a similar experience- in fact I skipped out on opening night in the hopes of avoiding chaos. I regret that, and will not be making the same mistake again. The show feels almost airy. Each artist has space to breathe, the building is gorgeous, with ample light and wooden floors. With limited exceptions, each artist felt like they had taken full advantage of their time at art school, producing works that felt like the full culmination of an undergrad. 

The opening night of the RMIT grad show was sticky, heaving, and a good reminder that my clubbing days are behind me. Bec and I trekked to Swanston street twice to view it, once in all its opening night chaos, and then the next morning for a more relaxed, albeit agenda driven visit. 

I’d be lying if I said attending the RMIT Grad Show opening was an enjoyable experience. It would’ve been an awesome party for the graduates whose work was on show, surrounded by their friends, family and fellow students. But as a punter it was not- it was hot, we were shoulder to shoulder packed like sardines in some rooms, and there was so much art on display that it became overwhelming. Charlotte and I had to leave after seeing about half the work and come back the next day to be able to actually take anything in. Although the amount of graduating student work was overwhelming, the sheer number of pieces on display allowed lots of it to fade into the background and that allowed my favourites to stand out to me.

Limitless Play is the group show currently on at No Vacancy. The title does not disappoint; the show is full of joyful, playful work that feels a bit like a party. The work feels whimsical yet well matched, with a cohesive visual style that works well together from all five artists. I imagine the opening would’ve been even more of a party with live music and movement performances over two nights, as well as a magazine launch (HOISZN issue 007) in the space on a third night. Also notably drinks sales on Performance Night and from the HOISZN launch event, plus some merch sale revenue (totalling $550 so far!) is to be donated directly to the Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency. This is admirable, especially when considering the whopping gallery hire fee which totals over $2k per week, in addition to the 20% commission No Vacancy takes on artwork sales. I didn’t manage to make opening night or any performances for this show, but maybe that’s for the best considering Charlotte’s dry cleaning bill after the red wine incident at the last opening Lowbrow attended at No Vacancy.

Now in its third year, Ants at Unassigned Gallery feels like a cornerstone of their calendar, the embodiment of the community focused gallery in Brunswick. The show is one in a number of small works exhibitions either on or coming up on the Melbourne arts calendar at the moment, though this iteration of the genre feels distinctly community minded, as most shows at Unassigned do. The show runs the gamut of genre, medium, and style, though there are a few recurring themes (namely the titular insect). With the smallest work measuring at just centimetres, it’s an exhibition that firmly shows you size isn’t everything, and that even the smallest works can pack a punch. The show is massive - 183 artists - but not unruly. The size made me focus on the details, in which I was too wrapped up to be bogged down by the sheer number of works on display.

I was working in a bookstore when Poor Artists hit the shelves and it was one that was mildly contentious in where it should be shelved. Fiction or non-fiction, in the art section or in biography? Poor Artists is like nothing I’ve ever read before in its structure. Co-authors Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (who I’ll call G&Z from here on out) remind us at the start of the book that this is a piece of art criticism, but I see it more specifically as criticism of the culture that surrounds art instead. Which I guess is exactly what art criticism is.  G&Z have been running a UK-based arts and culture commentary site The White Pube for ten years and published Poor Artists as a somewhat expansion of that in 2024.

Days are getting shorter (false), trees are changing colour (in full bloom), and there’s a chill in the air (depends on the day: it is Melbourne). Lies though these all may be, down Tyler Street in Preston there’s an art exhibition that could convince you it just might be true. With just eight artists in the show, this exhibition takes up the interior window space of Video Days, a vintage movie store trading in nostalgia. 

I ducked out of the rain earlier this week to check out Holly Goodridge’s The Shape of Rest at Mailbox Art Space. The show fills nineteen repurposed wooden mailboxes in the foyer of Pawson House on Flinders Lane in Melbourne’s CBD. Mailbox Art Space is a hidden secret for those who know about it, and I love being able to share it with friends who would otherwise walk past the unassuming building. I’ve written about Goodridge’s work previously, as part of the Convergence group show at Blindside and I’m so glad to be able to revisit her work in a place where it’s not competing for space against the rest of a student exhibition.

There’s something in the air, or is it in the oven- food has been a trend all over clothes (why are we so obsessed with tomatoes, and lemons, and canned fish?) that is now bleeding into the art world. For me (and most of us) food has shaped my life.An unconventional (read: international) upbringing exposed me not only to art at a young age, but a wide variety of foods. I grew up counting down the days towards meals- Canadian Thanksgiving (immediate family, Mum’s brûléed sweet potatoes), Christmas Eve (California, Auntie Lynn’s kielbasa hors d'oeuvre), Christmas (flaming plum pudding), Easter (ham), and Mother’s Day (Les Fougeres’ house salad). It was these moments at tables that made up the year more than the holidays themselves. In so much of the art I’ve seen lately, these links have been reflected back to me. Cooking and art are labours of love, they feed us, and often don’t get the appreciation the time and effort deserve. 

Personally, I’ve been a longtime Hillvale Photo fan. I've been dropping my film to be developed by the team there for years - since they had a lil’ tiny shop on a slightly different Brunswick back street from where they now operate their much larger lab and gallery. The Photo Trophy is Hillvale’s annual photography competition, where they print and display all entries in a salon style hang that completely fills the walls of their gallery space. There’s something to be said for a gallery that only showcases one particular art form, and especially photography, which so often gets overlooked in group shows.

For four nights (and four nights only) Collingwood Yards was the home to Entangled Worlds, a Melbourne Fringe Festival activation by the Centre for Projection Arts. Curated by Yandell Walton, the event put the site into a new light (pun intended). I spent the night looking up, around, and all over in pursuit of the ephemeral artworks. The exhibition put a spotlight on the Centre’s Art Residency program, with all eleven of the featured artists either currently taking part or alumni of it. 

This is my first time writing a review for a show, thank god its someone I know! Harmonising With My Kitchen Fan is a group show curated by Iona Mackenzie, featuring herself, Madeleine Minack, and Hayley Does at Oddany Gallery in Brunswick. I always love coming into Oddany, I love the drapes, high ceilings and candles scattered about, it is a character in its own right.