Opening Launch: Wednesday 9 October 6-8pm | Exhibition Dates: October 9 - October 26, 2024



Phoebe Thompson, Lil Longman, Zeth Cameron & Holly Goodridge

Got a queer funny feeling

Picture yourself rummaging through the sale haberdashery section, or digging through fabric offcuts in your local op shop. Picture your kooky friend's childhood bedroom. Picture the weaving shapes and colours of the queer club bathroom exploding around you.

This group show investigates textiles and soft sculpture as objects evocative of, and imbued with play, sensuality and care. Embedded within these tactile, textural objects and their slow creation, is an innate intimacy and comfort owing to their closeness to the body and their kinship with well-worn childhood stuffed toys or blankets.

Textile arts—historically denigrated as ‘low art’, ‘women’s crafts’, or marginalised as mere labour—have been used in queer artforms to navigate and investigate social boundaries. Here, the uncanny valley of sexual and sensual (and ridiculous, over the top, flamboyant et cetera) queer aesthetics overlaid with youthful nostalgia challenges the hierarchy of the traditionally male, individualistic, ‘professional’ white box gallery. Textile arts come with metaphor innately woven into their fabric as literal connective methods and motions that bind and bring together. Meanwhile the works themselves, created in collaboration and conversation joyfully and foolishly interact, connect, and intermingle, in an ode to strongly interconnected communities.

You are invited into our intimate, sensory space, to touch and feel, play and be. Go on, have a giggle. We dare you! ;) 



Tash Jackson

Auras

This exhibition evolved and its overall concept changed with each painting I created. I despise the fact that I have to sum the process up within a paragraph. But if I have to…….

Auras is an exploration of the different ideas of femininity created by society. Most of the pieces are homages to stereotypes society inflicts on women. This series of surrealist watercolour portraits present stereotypical concepts of femininity such as, being feminine is having long hair, women should smile more, women should dress ‘femininely’. 

The one outlier in the series is Sarah, a moment captured mid conversation that I’m sure many of you will invent your own version of what it implies and what she was thinking at the time. Historically, women in art were rarely presented with anything other than a serene expression on their faces and I see no point in continuing with presenting the same idea of what women feel, think and are. 

Tash Jackson is a Melbourne/ Naarm based watercolour artist. Romanticising the world surrounding her is essential to how she experiences and views it. Using predominantly watercolour on paper, Jackson presents her inner romantic views of society, familial relationships and femininity. 

The process of breaking down and dissecting an image allows her to take her time immersing herself in the process of creating a symbolic image. Jackson creates intimacy by spending time with her works. Her compulsion to allow the work to develop at its own pace results in the daydreamed perspective that she conjures up in her mind. She uses imagery that is surrealist, symbolic and figurative in nature, bright and unrealistic in colour to present her romanticised perspective. 

Jackson is currently exploring different avenues of creating large scale paper works. She does this by using multiple panels in a jigsaw formation that seamlessly fit together. This method is complementary to her process of dissecting an image into elements, which is essential to her development of a piece. 

While exploring this avenue of creating large scale works, Jackson was fortunate to be nominated as a finalist for the Biennial Flow Watercolour Artist Prize 2023.



Felix Oliver & Clement Lazzaro

Doxxed

Import cigarettes, counterfeit luxury, dupe core, forgery. A palimpsest of fuckery. A chronically online enclosure brink with radicals. Pressed tin painted gold. Pleather. TikTok physicality. The contemporary as a counter culture to whatever proceeded it. Techno accelerists, incels, neo liberals, neo anarchists and neo neo’s. Then there is Morgan Bistro, his TikTok architectures, his brutalist bakehouse. I bet he has a cavoodle. It’s zoo architecture, captive formalism. He’s a cwassant corbusier.

A hidden language of gestures at play. Signals, side eye, funnelled domination. An elusive space to be surveilled.
I notice these rituals now, my every move as a microcosm. Happenings at the not so sacred.

The counterfeit as a material counter culture. Hulk Hogan opening the proceedings at the RNC by ripping his shirt off and revealing a trump 2024 wife beater.

Centred through loss, memory, and ownership, Felix’s work examines relations between the constructed natures of ideas, symbols and rules. He considers what occurs when shifts are undergone, what is torn away, and what could possibly be filled into these lost spaces.

Through orchestrated photography, Felix’s practice captures conversations of gesture. How do we embrace each other while traversing undercurrents? Navigating; the fluidity of despair, support and release in an attempt to embody the experience and tension of change.

Felix’s practice studies the experience of holding on tightly to another while observing memory shifting, distorting and fleeting.

Clement Lazzaro is an artist living and working in Naarm. He investigates the possibilities of the counterfeit as a counter cultural material.
The theatrics of the dupe and the crude histrionics of the radically online political enclosure. This is conceived through a sculptural practice, with an emphasis on precious metals, fabrics and gem stones.