Blindside Summer Studio

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There are spectacular views from the windows of Blindside’s seventh-floor gallery in Melbourne’s Chicago-style Nicholas Building. Overlooking Flinders Street Station and Federation Square and then the verdant strip of Birrarung Marr, it’s not a bad spot to spend summer days if you have to be inside.

Now in its sixth iteration in an almost 14-year-old Artist Run Initiative, Blindside’s Summer Studio residency allows artists to develop their work over a three-week period during the art world’s quieter time, culminating in an exhibition in mid-January.

Curator of this year’s residencies Lili Belle Birchall says that the artists selected will be “exploring their practice, and then they can take their work wherever they want to”. Expect fertile testing grounds.

Play Centre is the collaborative project of Melbourne-based artists, si ma va and Jess Gall. It formed from friendship, and together they have performed both publicly and in gallery spaces to, as si ma va tells me, “do hack-job resolutions for what needs to be done”, in a jovial, performative manner.

One of the greatest needs in the world right now, and this may sound banal, is friendship, and basing a collaborative project around that idea is a well-timed glimmer of hope. Also undertaking the Studio are Jessie Burrows and Angela Louise Powell, who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015 and met up in Tokyo in late 2016. Together, they will explore this experience in the lead-up to their exhibition Shibuya Castle, named after the Tokyo apartment complex where they stayed. This summer, the pair will be experimenting with drawing, in all its myriad forms.

Blindside Summer Studio
Blindside
19 January – 21 January

Preview Words by Sarah Werkmeister