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. 

Limitless Play is the group show currently on at No Vacancy. The title does not disappoint; the show is full of joyful, playful work that feels a bit like a party. The work feels whimsical yet well matched, with a cohesive visual style that works well together from all five artists. I imagine the opening would’ve been even more of a party with live music and movement performances over two nights, as well as a magazine launch (HOISZN issue 007) in the space on a third night. Also notably drinks sales on Performance Night and from the HOISZN launch event, plus some merch sale revenue (totalling $550 so far!) is to be donated directly to the Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency. This is admirable, especially when considering the whopping gallery hire fee which totals over $2k per week, in addition to the 20% commission No Vacancy takes on artwork sales. I didn’t manage to make opening night or any performances for this show, but maybe that’s for the best considering Charlotte’s dry cleaning bill after the red wine incident at the last opening Lowbrow attended at No Vacancy.

Now in its third year, Ants at Unassigned Gallery feels like a cornerstone of their calendar, the embodiment of the community focused gallery in Brunswick. The show is one in a number of small works exhibitions either on or coming up on the Melbourne arts calendar at the moment, though this iteration of the genre feels distinctly community minded, as most shows at Unassigned do. The show runs the gamut of genre, medium, and style, though there are a few recurring themes (namely the titular insect). With the smallest work measuring at just centimetres, it’s an exhibition that firmly shows you size isn’t everything, and that even the smallest works can pack a punch. The show is massive - 183 artists - but not unruly. The size made me focus on the details, in which I was too wrapped up to be bogged down by the sheer number of works on display.

Days are getting shorter (false), trees are changing colour (in full bloom), and there’s a chill in the air (depends on the day: it is Melbourne). Lies though these all may be, down Tyler Street in Preston there’s an art exhibition that could convince you it just might be true. With just eight artists in the show, this exhibition takes up the interior window space of Video Days, a vintage movie store trading in nostalgia. 

I ducked out of the rain earlier this week to check out Holly Goodridge’s The Shape of Rest at Mailbox Art Space. The show fills nineteen repurposed wooden mailboxes in the foyer of Pawson House on Flinders Lane in Melbourne’s CBD. Mailbox Art Space is a hidden secret for those who know about it, and I love being able to share it with friends who would otherwise walk past the unassuming building. I’ve written about Goodridge’s work previously, as part of the Convergence group show at Blindside and I’m so glad to be able to revisit her work in a place where it’s not competing for space against the rest of a student exhibition.

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.

This is my first time writing a review for a show, thank god its someone I know! Harmonising With My Kitchen Fan is a group show curated by Iona Mackenzie, featuring herself, Madeleine Minack, and Hayley Does at Oddany Gallery in Brunswick. I always love coming into Oddany, I love the drapes, high ceilings and candles scattered about, it is a character in its own right.

Amanda Western’s Ways Through opens with an explanation of the linocut process, with her tools on a plinth, arming you with the knowledge that each print on show is the result of years of practice, and dozens of hours of painstaking carving. After that, you immediately encounter  the block and artist print for her Country Lane work. Between the size and the detail, it’s an apt greeting to an exhibition that runs the gamut of print sizing and detail, and a warm welcome to a show about the quiet moments and everyday places.

87 artists would be an ambitious group show for a large gallery. Even in an airy space like No Vacancy it felt overwhelming at points- with the sheer mass of the crowd for the opening I had to return the next day to get a full grasp of the show (and to take it in, while not covered in red wine). Wine-gate occurred right in the middle of the speeches announcing the winner, and was so obvious that I was recognised at the very next opening I went to as the girl who wore the wine at No Vacancy (I am so sorry to the bartender for bringing this up, it could have happened to anyone). After dropping my pants off at the dry cleaners, I returned to the scene of the crime to find out who actually won. The winning work, Horse Shell Tell Tale by Natalie Bessell won a solo show in the gallery space. Ruby Archer’s intimate oil on pine work Drive got the honourable mention.

Mary Cherry Contemporary is my pick for best named gallery in Melbourne. It’s just fun to say. Currently on at the Collingwood space is Jen Valender’s solo show Null is Not an Object. The exhibition feels intimate and meticulous, each work key in telling a wider story. It’s an homage to Valender’s early job as a cinema projectionist- a return to working intimately with celluloid film.

Curated by British born RMIT lecturer Jennifer Conroy Smith, Sensory Clay does not break boundaries as a group show, but does showcase promising artists from RMIT’s talent pool. On the whole, I found the show exciting. Ceramics is an under-represented field, but something I find is gaining more and more traction as emerging artists gain support. In particular, artists playing with form and blurring the barriers of materiality will be my enduring memory of this show.

In the nook of First Site is Xinshuo Zhuo’s Unnatured. Presented alongside three other exhibitions, Zhuo’s is the quietest. The works did not strike me at first sight, it was only in sitting with them- getting closer and truly taking my time that the detail and nuance struck me. Going back through them, finding the motifs (the butterflies, the obscured sun, the faceless woman, the hair) I wanted more. What Zhuo captures with analogue photography feels like nothing that could be imitated with modern means. There is a delicacy to the exhibition. 

When I think of rockpools I often reflect on the otherworldly dwellings in the shallows that emerge only as the waves roll out to sea and the tide is low. On entering Yindjibarndi artist, Katie West’s exhibition at Westspace, ‘Rockpools’, I was welcomed with the comforting and familiar sound of water and waves, nostalgic of summer afternoons on the coast. On further inspection, the sounds of water were transmitted through radios with antennas drawn, placed structurally on metal beams and grates, representing West’s own interpretation of a rockpool. Sparked with curiosity I wanted to understand how such a manmade structure could be reflective of a naturally created rockpool, especially, when I had such a literal representation in my own mind. West challenges this expected visual, reflecting the ‘detritus of colonisation’ with scavenged objects from tip shops in Karratha on Ngarluma Ngurra (Country) and in Noongar Ballardong Boodja (Country) to build her own rockpools.

If you had told me I would be spending my Wednesday being offered glasses of champagne at the Windsor Hotel two weeks ago I don’t think I would have believed you. Alas sans champagne (for this review did not write itself) there I stood, ready to contend fully with a cornerstone of the Melbourne art calendar, the Spring1883 Art Fair. There are 35 galleries in this iteration of the fair, hailing mainly from Melbourne, but also Sydney, New Zealand, and Mildura. 

My day at Spring1883 began with Kate Barber (fair co-founder and co-director) giving us a rundown of the fair in the gorgeous Kalli Rolfe Contemporary suite, its history, and her view on how it runs every year. Learning about the limitations of the heritage listing of the location- no damage to the walls means an unhealthy dependence on command hooks- and her vehement views on a non-hierarchical structure gave me the needed background to fully appreciate the tenth iteration of the fair. Important to note is that the rooms differ in size, obviously with the larger ones going to more established galleries but not for virtue of name, simply because it allows for the fair to provide a sliding scale, allowing for more young galleries and ARIs (artist-run initiatives) to take part.

A collaboration between Unassigned Gallery and Changing Room Gallery, SKETCHBOOK is ambitious, with this edition featuring over 40 artists. Lining the walls and multiple tables, the books run the gamut of artistic practice, stretching the limits of what a sketchbook is and can be. They are insights into how people see the world, and everything they encounter from the everyday to the imaginary. 

If anything, right now feels like a necessary moment for abstraction. It’s certainly the art I turn to time and again when I feel like I need something, anything to get lost in. We are grappling with a ruptured world- social media that goes from AI cat videos, to the destruction of Gaza, to the end stage capitalism of Labubus. None of it feels real or tangible or sensical. Abstraction has always emerged when the world ceased to be as knowable as it once was. Currently at SOL Gallery is Abstract Artists Never Sleep. Featuring 14 artists from the Hawthorn Artist Society, the group touts itself as an “untutored abstract art group.” Any exhibition blurb for an abstract show invariably contains some amalgamation of the words expressive, gesture, and dynamic - this one is no different. The best abstractions are the ones that draw you in and keep you looking, making you feel like if you just got a little bit closer, you’ll finally find exactly what you’ve been looking for. I connected deeply with some of the artists in a way I didn’t necessarily expect for a sunny afternoon in Fitzroy.

Badra Aji’s exhibition No More Dreaming Tonight offers viewers various entry points for reflection on identity, race and the complexities of living as a queer person of colour in so-called Australia. A continuation of his work as a finalist for the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize, No More Dreaming Tonight presents a narrative drawn from Aji’s own lived experience. Through the nineteen mailboxes of the Mailbox Art Space, Aji pulls the viewer into a fragmented narrative over the course of twenty days in 2012, a time during which the artist ‘woke up as a white man.’ During this period, Aji reconciled with notions of identity and belonging in a world that privileges whiteness and heteronormativity. Oscillating between drawing, photographs, found objects and text, the works provide moments of knowing and unknowing, allowing the viewer to consider various histories and piece together storylines that may or may not exist.

There’s something so captivating about small works, almost like you could reach out and hold the entire universe in your hands (please do not use this as an excuse to touch the artworks). In Beinart Gallery, tucked in the last room on the left, you’ll find 20 such works ready to take you to different worlds. English artist Caroline Dewison’s A Fantastic Journey presents 20 dioramas, five of which are automata. The whimsical art leans towards the weird in the best way, with each of these scenes fit for a fairy instead home to UFOs, leading you to wonder what’s really going on. 

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.