Galleria Crocodillo has no art on their walls for the month of May. Instead they’ve staged a scavenger hunt across the streets of the affectionately known ‘Presevoir’ (Preston / Reservoir for those not in the know). The starting point is a $2 map purchased from a vending machine that blocks the door of the gallery space. This map gives you ten destinations across Plenty Rd in Reservoir and High St in Preston to explore. Each destination is matched with a clue. Not only is this a scavenger hunt, but it’s equally a puzzle; the clues are also riddles that have you searching high and low, and the prize in this case is the art from these local artists.

It is with full confidence that I can say not a single art gallery on Gertrude Street is lowbrow. I mean, it’s Fitzroy: of course they aren't. This week though, I went back to my art history roots, and took a look at A Seat at the Table from Art & Collectors. Spanning 101 years (the oldest work a floral still life from 1925, the most recent a self portrait dating from this year) the exhibition is a snapshot of female Australian artists. At first glance, the show is filled with the prerequisite floral still lives, self-portraits, and snippets of home life that come with the territory of a broad subject matter like simply “female artists.” It's when you look through the works, take them in one by one that you see that this is a show of echoes – artists are echoing each other and themselves, calling out through the decades to continue a conversation. 

After visiting Inter-narratives of hope: building catastrophe resilience at MADA and before reading the accompanying exhibition I called a friend and had a whinge about this show. I complained that I didn’t see a strong connection between the works on display. I grumbled that the curatorial vision isn’t strong enough if it’s unclear from viewing the show alone, and you should’ve have to read an essay to derive meaning from an exhibition. I whinged that the title of the show was an over intellectualisation from PhD candidates (which I still partly stand behind) and inaccessible for the public as a curatorial concept. I’d like to make a correction to what I said to my friend; this is a great show, and made stronger by its accompanying text. I feel blind for not reading it while in the space and for only being able to view the work with this lens in hindsight.

Forever Bedroom, Nina Seeburg’s ode to our quietest, most personal spaces is an intimate portrayal of the refuge found in our childhood bedrooms, the first rooms of our own. Greeting you up the stairs that lead to Changing Room Gallery is a vanity, littered with personal effects (clown, axe, and giant dildo included) a taster for the intimacy and clarity of theming that defines Forever Bedroom. 

Though Bec has covered it before, and I live less than a kilometre away, I had never been to George Paton Gallery before this week. The UMSU Gallery was a trove of artistic potential, but perhaps none more so than As Long As You Love Me, the video installation work by Alanna Baxter, Lara Oluklu and Naimo Omar. I couldn’t tell you how long the loop is, as I was so engrossed, walking back and forth between the three screens so as to not miss anything, that I didn’t think to note the timing. Simple on a surface level – three screens, a dark curtain, white text on black cutting between film snippets – Baxter, Oluklu, and Omar have made something totally their own out of an entirely borrowed script. 

Before this Wednesday, I’d never been to HAIR before – strange, given its proximity to my beloved Queen Vic Market. Across the street from the iconic facade, HAIR neighbours Sticky Institute, and this exhibition spoke directly to its location, and The Last Chance (Rock & Roll Bar), just a few hundred metres away. Millennial Kennels by Jordan Halsall and Steven J Hutton features four kennels made of plywood, printed with images of jeans. The jeans are definitively punk, variously featuring rips, paint, buttons, patches, mending, and distress.

The turn from sunny to thunderstorm on the day I went to Double Feature at Artemisia kept me lingering longer, taking it all in, mulling over my thoughts as I parsed through the over 100 works on show at the High Street gallery. The name of the show points to the theming of: “Diptychs, duos, partners & pairs” though for some of the artists, this throughline was lost.

Part video work, part installation, ENEMIES! at TCB Gallery is a send up of the Melbourne arts scene that’s as funny as it is true. I’ll admit, when I first walked into TCB and saw two coffins, my expectations plummeted. Death of the artist, death of creativity, death of art were the first things that crossed my mind. The computer, perhaps too reminiscent of those I’ve spent my career working on, did not beckon me in. I turned away and took a look at Emma Nicole Berry’s a week long waiting room, filled with colour and images and prose before contending with Brunswick's own corporate hellscape. 

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.

As I enter the singular room of Craft Victoria and grab an exhibition sheet under the white spotlights,  my first instinct is to look at the artworks poking out of the ground. The annual show Fresh!, which has been running for 33 years, opened on Valentine’s Day at Craft Victoria. Like a geographical map, many of the works are spread out on the ground. I keep my head down; I’m an explorer that needs to make my way through the jungle of metal and glass. The artworks are either directly on the floor or lay on rustic wooden tables, and the one-dimensional works are attached without framing onto the wall. They are all interacting with the space given to them, directly in contact with either the floor or the wall. I feel like the curation strongly mirrors the common conveyed ideas of the eight graduates in the exhibition. The works are all revolving around connection; either between different materials, or within family, traditions, and queer communities.

Though hardly the first event of the year, the Melbourne Art Fair marks the end of summer, a back to school for the art scene in the city. It’s a key time to take the temperature of the market, see what is in vogue (abstract expressionism always) and out of favour (photography, with two notable exceptions). The Melbourne Art Fair is not lowbrow, though I certainly felt I was wandering through opening night. 

Walking down High St, the gnarled hands in the window were my first clue I was in the right place. The second was the canary yellow paste-ups papering the side of the building. At 83 High St in Prahran, an old, abandoned office building has been transformed into an art-filled haven, office-standard concrete and carpet notwithstanding. The hands were simultaneously flipping me off and beckoning me in, and were a great taster for what I would find inside of the fair, which for 2026 is aptly titled “Lust for Life.” There was never a time in the show that any one artist’s practice could have been confused with another. The curation was such that each inclusion was singular, yet the works spoke to each other but never repeated what the other was saying. 

George Paton Gallery is currently hosting two solo shows; Translucences by Soyo Paek and Purity and Danger by Leena O’Luu. The gallery, situated in the University of Melbourne’s Arts and Culture building at the Parkville campus, is run by the university’s student union (UMSU). Work is chosen via a proposals process and only current Uni Melb students can apply. George Paton gallery fills a strange niche at the university, in that it doesn’t feel like a student gallery, and that it’s so separate from UniMelb’s Southbank VCA campus - which is where all of the creative arts students are situated. George Paton feels more aligned with the professional side of the university, rather than the student side, even though it’s definitely student work 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.”

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. 

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. 

I went into the MADA Grad Show with no expectations. The campus is foreign to me, I don’t know any of the grads, and the people I know who go to Monash are in the music department. I was blown away. Given all the artists are BFAs or Honours, and my somewhat chaotic experience of the RMIT show, I expected a similar experience- in fact I skipped out on opening night in the hopes of avoiding chaos. I regret that, and will not be making the same mistake again. The show feels almost airy. Each artist has space to breathe, the building is gorgeous, with ample light and wooden floors. With limited exceptions, each artist felt like they had taken full advantage of their time at art school, producing works that felt like the full culmination of an undergrad.