Revolver Oil - Secret Chamber
Three Instagram messages, two trams, and one elevator ride were the price to pay for admittance to Melbourne’s newest gallery. The brainchild of Oliver Wood, Amelia Yilan Wilson, and Valeriy Taouk and located in the photography department of VCA, the project takes over a storage nook. The show changes weekly (time permitting) and makes me truly excited for what the kids these days (talented undergrads) are doing. Ostensibly appointment only (open to anyone with a VCA swipe card) the space is genuinely fun, not at all the dank, ominous room its original use would suggest.
The current showing, Revolver Oil, has the air of irreverence you’d expect from the space. The works are playful, if disjointed. A moustachioed lipstick (Clinton Ique), repeated images of a fork in a cantaloupe (Anthony Loupe), skewered oranges, and a spiked box housing tables in the most “look at me green” I’ve ever seen were the works my eye was originally drawn to. After speaking with Wood, Wilson, and Taouk (with a brief cameo by Lou Hubbard), I went back in and was captured by the video work (Eddie M. Bridge). The horse, not galloping or moving in any natural way, was oddly mesmerising. Melbourne has been hit with an influx of solid, original video art this year and I’m all for it. Bridge’s work is a door to a world where Muybridge’s chronophotography took a turn for the surreal over the scientific.
The almost absurdly green box has been turned into part of the work for the week, but a look back at previous exhibitions shows it as central to the space outside of table storage. It’s a defining feature of the gallery, as much part of it as the locker walls and the now defunct trap door built directly into the floor. The most direct line I could draw to other spaces is Strawberry Gallery: a totally unassuming building with a gallery that consistently surprises me.
Secret Chamber, both in form and content, is so much more than meets the eye. You walk into a group show, only to come out knowing it’s all Wood’s work, made over one weekend. Wood, Yilan Wilson, and Taouk took a swing and hit. It works for many reasons, its ephemerality paired with their talent among them. Secret Chamber will end with the VCA year. Asking them for a quote about their project, Secret Chamber sent me: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The quote isn’t Lenin, but it just might be them.
Secret Chamber is located in the Photography Department of VCA.