I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never been to Off The Kerb before. The pay to play gallery model that Off the Kerb and other galleries like it use (PG Printmaker, fortyfivedownstairs, Brunswick Street Gallery, SOL) has perplexed me since I was in art school; not quite a commercial gallery, not quite an ARI, but a secret third thing that hovers between the two. Yet, they do hold an important place in the community for those ready to exhibit their work, but not in the stable of a commercial gallery. Their current exhibition, Summer Daze, is under the umbrella of Midsumma festival - Melbourne’s LQBTQIA+ arts and culture festival that plays out across the city through January and February.

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.

The current show at Assembly Point has been curated by Lani Seligman & Kiron Robinson, and it moves in relative silence. Heralded by the title of the show ‘masterpiece’, the artists, and curators are named, but no other information is present on the scene. The works themselves aren’t credited individually, there’s no exhibition text, and there’s nothing online I could find about the show. After being initially frustrated about this, as it’s admittedly a bit hard to write about art when you know nothing about it, I came round to liking the lack of information (although I did message one of the artists eventually, just to find out whose work is whose). It allows the work to speak for itself, and feels more like public art than any formal kind of exhibition. 

When I went to Unassigned to have a poke around the In The Making show by Many Hands Make, a pot luck lunch was being packed up. A long table set up in the middle of the gallery was draped in tablecloths and showed the evidence of a meal shared between friends. I’m so enamoured with how many community events are hosted at Unassigned and how eager the community is to connect with these events. From meals like this potluck, to admin monday which turns the gallery into a co-working space, to fundraisers like Lesbian Mud Wrestling, or the weekly life drawing sessions that are about to start back up. Unassigned is such an important part of the emerging artist community and shows like In The Making prove that even further. 

The end of the year always makes me a bit emotional. I’m someone who is sappy and sentimental at the best of times, and there is truly no better occasion to be so than a time of year which calls for us to be reflective.

I remember a conversation in probably 2020 or 2021 with my best friend, Lotte, about making a combined site where I reviewed art and she reviewed theatre. So clearly Lowbrow has been a thought at the back of my head for a long time, even though it only came to fruition this year. This all started as a project for my Masters, and I think I needed the push from that formal structure in order to finally put pen to paper and start writing. This article is fittingly timed as I graduated that Masters degree this week, and you know what - I will put in a photo of me in cap and gown because a) I look excellent b) I’m proud of myself and c) I never got to have a graduation ceremony for my undergrad bc I was a 2020 covid grad. Please, for your viewing pleasure, enjoy this photo of Charlotte and I sweating though our polyester in Wednesday afternoon’s heat. And yes I did refuse to take off my silly little hat for the rest of the day.

Round 2 of the RMIT grad shows left a lot to be desired. For whatever reason, most works felt like I had seen them before, not in the sense that they felt warmly familiar, but that I was being shown the same exhibition time and again. I’ll also admit I had higher expectations for this post-graduate exhibition. I generally liked most of the work, but not much of it jumped out to me as favourites. Lots of it blended into each other. This could be due to grad show fatigue of sorts? Seeing so much graduating student work in such a short amount of time, it’s impossible to not compare it all to each other. 

The thing that stuck out to me about the 2025 VCA grad showwas theswathes of space each artist had. Some had whole walls, others had whole rooms. It definitely seemed like each grad had probably about four times the amount of room that each of the RMIT students had in their recent grad show install. I heard through the grapevine (gossiping with other ex-students I ran into) that the painting department only had 20 graduating students this year, in comparison to 35 last year. Considering the starting cohort sits around 40 students, this is a huge drop out rate. This is a trend across all departments (although painting definitely has the biggest difference in numbers), which makes me wonder why exactly the drop out rate was so high for the class of 2025.

I’d be lying if I said attending the RMIT Grad Show opening was an enjoyable experience. It would’ve been an awesome party for the graduates whose work was on show, surrounded by their friends, family and fellow students. But as a punter it was not- it was hot, we were shoulder to shoulder packed like sardines in some rooms, and there was so much art on display that it became overwhelming. Charlotte and I had to leave after seeing about half the work and come back the next day to be able to actually take anything in. Although the amount of graduating student work was overwhelming, the sheer number of pieces on display allowed lots of it to fade into the background and that allowed my favourites to stand out to me.

Personally, I’ve been a longtime Hillvale Photo fan. I've been dropping my film to be developed by the team there for years - since they had a lil’ tiny shop on a slightly different Brunswick back street from where they now operate their much larger lab and gallery. The Photo Trophy is Hillvale’s annual photography competition, where they print and display all entries in a salon style hang that completely fills the walls of their gallery space. There’s something to be said for a gallery that only showcases one particular art form, and especially photography, which so often gets overlooked in group shows.