To launch the new Lowbrow Art Book Club (tentatively titled Bottom Shelf, but we’re taking suggestions), which will be coming to you all on the last Tuesday of every month, I couldn’t think of a better exhibition to see this week than A Library of Libraries at Blindside. My first time at the gallery’s new North Melbourne location, I was welcomed in by the curator Grey Dear, and shown around the show that is a collection of collections. I wasn’t able to make it on opening night (like Charlotte was), but snuck in a day earlier to spend some time in the space reading a few of the many books on display.

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.”

There’s something in the air, or is it in the oven- food has been a trend all over clothes (why are we so obsessed with tomatoes, and lemons, and canned fish?) that is now bleeding into the art world. For me (and most of us) food has shaped my life.An unconventional (read: international) upbringing exposed me not only to art at a young age, but a wide variety of foods. I grew up counting down the days towards meals- Canadian Thanksgiving (immediate family, Mum’s brûléed sweet potatoes), Christmas Eve (California, Auntie Lynn’s kielbasa hors d'oeuvre), Christmas (flaming plum pudding), Easter (ham), and Mother’s Day (Les Fougeres’ house salad). It was these moments at tables that made up the year more than the holidays themselves. In so much of the art I’ve seen lately, these links have been reflected back to me. Cooking and art are labours of love, they feed us, and often don’t get the appreciation the time and effort deserve. 

Convergence: A Spatial Negotiation at Blindside brings together 23 masters students from RMIT across Arts Management, Fine Art, and Photography. It certainly is a spatial negotiation to fit the work of 15 artists into one room of the gallery, and even more of a spatial negotiation to fit their friends and family in for the opening I attended last night.

Not to be a hater, but hearing that the artists for Blindside’s current Debut XXI exhibition were drawn from recent art school graduates, I didn’t have particularly high expectations. Maybe that’s just me being jaded from my own experience at art school, especially with our grad show that never really was (2020 lockdown grad here 😬). BUT! I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised by Debut XXI, but I was actually incredibly taken with the whole show. Curators Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Veronica Charmont have brought together work by seven artists and created an exhibition that not only works seamlessly, but even reflects back glowingly on art schools for shaping these emerging artists.