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.
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
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
