The first thing I heard walking into 45 Flinders Lane was “I loved the cockroach.” Immediately I was intrigued. The aforementioned cockroach (Jent Do’s The Sacred Cockroach) is just one work among many in the tenth edition of fortyfivedownstairs’ Emerging Artist Awards. The award, this year judged by Anthony White, showcases a well honed selection of early career artists across all mediums. The opening was packed, with attendees waiting to hear who would be awarded the $3000 prize pool.

I would argue that absolutely miserable weather (read: Melbourne Winter) is the best time to go see some art. This is only made better by being combined with a good cappuccino. Currently greeting you outside No Vacancy in the CBD is Lea Thompson’s Romance triptych- an ethereal, floral abstract work that invites you into the warmth and calm that is Thompson’s current exhibition. Une Vie Romantique is a 19 work exhibition of abstracted landscapes “exploring the soft space between memory and perception.” The exhibition is near antithetical to the Melbourne winter, full of soft colours and warmth that for the time I spent perusing the works and drinking a cappuccino, made me forget about the torrential rain outside while encompassed in the soft colours of Thompson’s romantic view of life.

Unassigned Gallery was wall to wall when I visited the opening of The Q Files: The Queer Is Out There on Saturday. It was totally packed, shoulder to shoulder, cannot take a step kinda busy. It was so busy that my friend and I could barely get in the door when we arrived and had to take a lap of Sydney road, get some dinner and a drink, and then circle back later to even be able to get inside and see the walls. It’s wonderful to see such an amazing turn out and a great show of community, for such a community driven show. There were DJs, drag, and even a food truck out the front for this opening party. And of course they kicked on at iconic lesbian bar Flippy’s. It really felt like a party and a celebration of all the work that goes into an exhibition like this, for both the artists and the curators. Queer Love Collective, run by Ruby Vaggelas and Madi Sherburn, focuses on creating inclusive local exhibitions at LGBTQIA+ venues for queer creatives. They seem to have a lovely relationship with gallerist Nour Abdullatif, who runs the space. Organising an open call show is certainly hard work, and Queer Love Collective (QLC) and Unassigned have certainly pulled it off!

Shannon Syme’s installation draws you in through SOL Gallery’s window, promising warmth as a reprieve from the cold. Taking up the first room of SOL Gallery’s to-hire space, Syme uses drawing and installation to explore her relationship with the world that surrounds her. At the back in the second space is Carlo Pagoda’s Circo Cristiano exhibition which conflates the magic of the circus with the mystic nature of Catholicism. These are two solo shows with little in common with each other except sharing the gallery, which isn’t a bad thing!! I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the overwhelming installation in Syme’s rooms and the reverent refined work of Pagoda’s in the back.

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.

I’ve written about it before, but I am obsessed with the currently popular style of painting that views things softly, holding them in a blurry state of flux. But this isn’t to say that Melissa is doing what everyone else is doing!! Nguyen has a distinct style and voice in her paintings. From the neon Con Chó (Không Mèo) that greets you at the door, to the body of work around the corner in the main gallery space. Utilising a limited palette that blends into itself, each work becomes even more definite through colour. Hung together, Makamp and Vải Lanh, create a nostalgic and fragmented dialogue with each other. It reminds me of seeing my dad standing in his garden - the light filtering through the leaves, the ground soft beneath our collective feet, a memory hazy through time.  And Pokémon will always remind me of my childhood; playing on the Gameboy with my brother until it was too dark to see the screen anymore - I always picked Charmander as my starter. Reliving memories of the past can fragment them - replaying something and copying it in turn then creates something new.

Wunderkammer, literally translated from German means ‘wonder chamber’ or ‘room of wonders’. The term refers to cabinets of curiosities, collections of oddities and treasures, even royal collections of jewellery or similarly prized possessions. Which is exactly what Ivana Lilith has transformed Mailbox Art Space into. The nineteen wooden mailboxes are reflective of old school museum display cases: little vitrines to house precious treasures safe behind their glass. On first impression Lilith’s ceramic sculptures, her ‘oddities’, are delicate and feminine, being protected in their display cases. White and pink, with horses, swans, lilies, boobs and feminine curves being the first things you see. But when looking closer, this initial softness subsides - you see the hands ripping to open the chests of their headless figures. These are distorted, stretching, contorted humanoid creatures, some headless, others with devilish horns.

I was drawn to West Space’s current exhibition Inheritance with the promise of divination; artist Phuong Ngo guiding participants to ask yes/no questions to be answered by the French Indochinese coins of his maternal grandmother. While I don’t particularly believe in fortune telling or any other similarly woo woo aligned practices, I do however believe in using these exercises as tools of reflection to better understand the self. I sat down with Phuong and asked the coins my first question: Am I on the right path, right now? and got what Phuong described as a ‘sarcastic no’ from the ancestors. I’m choosing to take this as their concern for my chosen career path in the arts, including my upcoming graduation from my Master’s degree with no immediate job prospects or leads of any kind. (I want a job!! I’m simply begging at this point!!) But anyway … I asked the coins a second question, and it appears the ancestors seem to think my love life is on the right track, so that’s some kind of consolation prize at least? I guess??

I often find that curator’s texts that accompany exhibitions leave me more confused after reading them. Instead of making the vision clearer, I’m usually left with the feeling that the curator wants me to think they’re smarter than me, and that they see something in the work that I don’t. Maybe in part that’s my own insecurity about not “getting it” coming through, but also in part I think it’s a hatred for the over intellectualisation of art and the aptly named “art wank” of it all. BUT!!! Ava Leach-Absalom and Mia Lewin manage to avoid this and instead leave me with a text which “evokes a world of memory not as a linear archive but a flickering presence” - a piece of writing that truly pulls this show together. And! their writing mirrors George Trackl’s poem from which they’ve drawn their inspiration! Oddaný’s current show draws its title from George Trakl’s Memory (fragment); Silently, childhood’s crystalline paths sank in the garden. Memories and remnants of the past are threads that draw this exhibition together, as well as an aesthetic sensibility full of soft neutrals contrasting an industrial feeling.

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.