Forever Bedroom - Changing Room Gallery
Image courtesy of Selina Vicenzino
Forever Bedroom, Nina Seeburg’s ode to our quietest, most personal spaces is an intimate portrayal of the refuge found in our childhood bedrooms, the first rooms of our own. Greeting you up the stairs that lead to Changing Room Gallery is a vanity, littered with personal effects (clown, axe, and giant dildo included) a taster for the intimacy and clarity of theming that defines Forever Bedroom.
The strengths of the exhibition are in the non-traditional works, identity forged through the uses of fabric, of furniture, of found objects. The textile works by Charlie McCosh, Ayah Zakout, and Seeburg herself are both visual art and poetry, their impact coming from their form as much as the words embroidered or printed on them. It was Zakout’s work that I returned to both on opening night and on my return, reading through the prose, getting as absorbed in the words as I was in the world Seeburg created. McCosh, too, has a way with words. Embroidered with lyrics to a self-written song: blanket song. The lyrics, about a breakup, sharing diary passages, and the regret of tenderness that comes in the rupture of a relationship and before the comforting nostalgia of closure, felt like a refrain for the wider exhibition. What is your bedroom, especially your teenage bedroom, if not your diary manifest? Seeburg has curated a world that encapsulates this, reinforcing that it is our most intimate reflections on ourselves that are the most universal.
Ren Nevard’s felted Dog on the bed is a warmly familiar sight, Norm rendered so tenderly that you could reach out and pet him. Olivia Summerhayes’ In Homage of Femmage pays homage to the 70s feminist craft movement, and in doing so captures the breadth of Forever Bedroom as a show. Off to bed was a sleeper standout. Minute in size, Lily Wenmouth’s signet ring replaces family insignia with a bed ready to welcome you back in. The show is also one of doubles: double acts, works echoing each other and calling to one another from across the room. Gemma Raso’s cyanotype curtain, a portal to Caitlyn Smith’s printed cyanotype snapshots, haloed by beaded frames, calling back to a childhood craft made fresh. Jordan Schembri and Jess Green’s the portal is yet another door next to Smith, albeit a sheer one, taking away the starkness from the walls and inviting in the whimsy of beaded curtains.
What made the exhibition for me is also what nearly broke it. For $825 plus a 20% commission on sales, Changing Room Gallery should have done better by the exhibition and its artists. It’s a phenomenal space – I do not think this exhibition would have packed as big of a punch in a more traditional space – but the lack of care when I returned it felt less like a gallery space and more like a spare room. The lights were off (thank god for the skylight), the video work wasn’t on (at least I had seen it during the opening) and the corners had been commandeered for folding table storage. For a space that is renting itself out and taking a cut of sales, I’d think that there’s a level of professionalism that would be assumed. It’s a failure of the management that staff clearly aren’t trained to operate the gallery. That being said, this exhibition would not have packed so much of a punch, been so transformative in a room that it would not make totally its own. Even in my dimly lit return, I felt like I had returned to a friend's house, left alone in their room after the house party, awaiting their return.
Forever Bedroom is on at Changing Room Gallery until 19 April.