Chokehold - BLINDSIDE
Images courtesy Blindside and Alaiya.
A disclaimer to start. I did help install this exhibition (for free) and do know Madi Sherburn personally. I used the install to talk to Madi about their history with Blindside and what this collaborative exhibition means to them. All views are my own, and again, I was not paid.
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.”
Featuring works by C.Moore Hardy from the Australian Queer Archives, Chokehold: Wrestling with Queerness is presented by Queer Love Collective. A tight exhibition of a handful of photographs, it’s a history of queerness and athleticism, that puts athletes and bodies up on stage, forcing you to look up as if they are already champions upon a podium. Printed on architect plan print paper, the photographs almost felt like newspapers tacked up on the walls, showing news coverage of 1980s Olympians - though rather than Tom Daley, you’re face to face with the Muff Divers. The near grainy quality of the prints on the flimsy paper added an additional layer of nostalgia to the works. On the rear wall of the gallery was the strongest group of images from the show.
One photo, featuring an athlete posed with weights in each hand, legs held up and spread, the image of strength feels lit from within. The work is presented alongside a tableau of feats of flexibility. There’s a wry nature to the images coupled with their eroticism - a full moon and a full bush.
The panel discussion that accompanied the show I unfortunately missed, but the peep show I did catch. Your ticket to the peep show was a donation to a mutual aid fund. Your view of the peep show was through the kitchen window. Peeking over the sink and into the yard, I thoroughly felt like I took a page out of L.B. Jefferies’ book. Akin to Muscle Beach (though fewer steroids and more sun protection) I thought back to what Sherburn spoke of when we talked at length about Lesbian Mud Wrestling, Chokehold, and desire:
“I've always been a big fan of erotic art and erotic photography because of the nuance behind it. Being able to just be like ‘yeah, sure, this is kind of horny, but we're not just looking at the perversion or desire of it. We're also considering what exactly it does mean to be, creating art for our own desire and for our own pleasure. Because at the end of the day, that is what a lot of creativity is all about. It's about some form of derived pleasure that you're getting from making and from producing something.”
For a one day exhibition, Chokehold packed a punch. It was a quiet debut of a new era for a Melbourne mainstay, with what was (in many ways) a quintessentially Melbourne show.
Chokehold: Wrestling with Queerness was at Blindside on 31 January 2026.