SOULS - SOL Gallery
Kate Galea
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.
My two favourites in the show were Jess Angwin’s screenprints and Shane McGowan drawings. Both of these artist’s work stands strongly and solidly alone, but being presented in the same show together they create a narrative of materiality between them. As these works have a similar sensibility, not just in the colour schemes, but in the way they use their process to obscure the subject matter. McGowan’s mixed media drawings feel hazy and soft like half remembered summer evenings. All thirteen of the drawings on display are snippets from one photograph the artist took of his husband in Times Square in the 90’s. One image, one memory, fractured and recreated across the wall.
Now, all my loyal Lowbrow readers know, I’m a printmaker at heart, and specifically a screenprint nerd. So bear with me while I obsess over these prints. Angwin uses the process of screenprinting, specifically the halftone colour separation, to add to the chaos of the bathroom graffiti they’ve photographed. The layers of the screenprint mimic the way bathroom graffiti builds in layers; people’s tag building a base for which stickers are haphazardly stuck over one another. Bathroom graffiti, especially in queer spaces, is also so often a place where people voice their political opinions, see Angwin’s piece that states ‘FUCK ICE - NO BORDERS - NO DEPORTING’, which is mirrored in the history of screenprints being a cheap and easy way to disseminate posters and pamflets and other political or revolutionary material. If I wasn’t broke as shit rn I would be buying one of these prints and hanging it alongside one of McGowan’s drawings.
From Suzanne Phoenix’s powerful collection of photographs showing queer joy across Naarm’s LGBTQIA+ events calendar to Jean-Luc Syndikas and Cain Cooper’s collaborative photographic and drawing work. I was interested in the range brought together in this show, both across mediums and subject matter. In some aspects it could be seen on a surface level that these artists and their work have nothing in common except identifying as queer, yet for me the joyful, playful nature of many of the pieces and the curation of the show managed to tie it all back together again. Such as Alistair Fowler’s wall mounted ceramic pieces that touted things like ‘HOT LEGS’, ‘CRY BOY CRY’, and ‘WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS’. Some of these works felt cheeky, others felt like badges of honour. They are interspersed with the faces and animals peering out amongst the slabs of text, adding to the playful whimsy the colours and slogans bring. Kate Galea’s paintings are equally bright and playful, but in a structured way.
The show is on until the 1st of Feb at SOL Gallery on Brunswick St Fitzroy and Midsumma programming runs in many different forms across Naarm until the 8th.