A Library of Libraries - Blindside
To launch the new Lowbrow Art Book Club (tentatively titled Bottom Shelf, but we’re taking suggestions), which will be coming to you all on the last Tuesday of every month, I couldn’t think of a better exhibition to see this week than A Library of Libraries at Blindside. My first time at the gallery’s new North Melbourne location, I was welcomed in by the curator Grey Dear, and shown around the show that is a collection of collections. I wasn’t able to make it on opening night (like Charlotte was), but snuck in a day earlier to spend some time in the space reading a few of the many books on display.
My favourite that I picked up and delved into was I occupy space, which is to say, i am always grieving by Chi Tran, a small zine whose poetry was raw and direct. I found it in the Đất Nước Library, a community-curated library from Vietnam and its diaspora. Amongst this collection was a stunning artist book by Phuong Ngo to accompany the artists’ Inheritance show which I wrote about when it was at West Space last year. The golden gilded edges glittered in the light and I almost didn’t want to spin the book out to see the photos and patterns and colours inside, as it would ruin the perfect gold brick.. The Đất Nước Library was set up as a mini reading room within the larger reading room of the gallery. Complete with red plastic stools, snacks, a woven plastic rug, and someone’s house slippers already removed at the edge of the space. A homely book nook inviting reflection and a place to take a beat, at odds against the tram tracks rattling just outside the door.
A similar diasporic community archive present in the space is the Pagbasa Archive, a multimedia Filipinx archive cataloging contemporary Filipino art, design, text, sound, ephemera, performance and video. There was a library of dictionaries and Aaron Perkins’ dictionary of typos. There was a library of hand bound artist books from Roundtable Readings, hand stitched and adorned with wax seals and photos and fabric horses. My main wish for this show was simply that I had more time to stay and spend in the space, to explore these collections in depth. However, Jessi Ryan’s QRAVE interview series, presented in the space as pink light up QR codes, were easy to take with me to continue listening to. These interviews chronicle eight short verbal Queer histories from Melbourne. My favourite being Meg Slater and Ted Gott speaking about Keith Haring and his mural in Collingwood.
As someone who collects ephemera from everywhere I go and everything I do (you would dread to see my junk journal or the trinkets that line my window sill) I LOVED Charlie Lee’s Collection (of >216 interruptions) of biblio-ephemera from inside library books. Seeing this collection sparks the joy that finding a secret gem on the op shop racks does, or $5 tucked in the pocket of your jeans that you’d forgotten about; the joy of finding something small and great when it’s least expected. This collection features homework and shopping lists and envelopes that have been scribbled on (probably absent mindedly while on the phone). There’s a couple family photographs,a crumpled parking ticket, even an empty pill packet. I would’ve loved to see the artist’s interaction and performance with this work over opening night; the collection changing as it is moved around, new groups forming, new stories being pulled from these items as their interactions with each other change.
There’s a thread to be drawn from Lee’s collection to Jasmin Seale’s Collection of found chewing gum. Similarly made up of found objects, these pieces of chewing gum, rather than being forgotten, have been left deliberately by their previous owners in places they probably shouldn't have been. It’s a visceral collection, one that I can physically feel as I remember how it feels to accidentally touch warm used gum under a restaurant table or find hardened gum stuck to my favourite skirt after sitting on a tram.
I love the meta nature of a collection of collections, a library of libraries. The show is expansive, and feels like it could swell outwards infinitely from this starting point. The importance of this show is the physicality of it in an ever digitising world. Sitting and reading a book that you never would’ve stumbled upon or known about otherwise. The invitation to use the space as a reading room, and place to work, feels like a mirror to my local library in high school being my go to study location. Both Charlotte and I have started archiving the ephemera of Lowbrow related activities; room sheets, essays, bookmarks, tickets. Lowbrow is, in many ways, an archive as well. What is this website but not an archive of emerging Melbourne art, and an archive of writing on that art.
A Library of Libraries is on at Blindside until March 28th and will feature workshops and activations throughout the show.