BLINDSIDE

🌟EOIs Open for Blindside Studios!🌟

A small number of artist studios will be available from Jan–June 2026 at our gallery space in the Nicholas Building.

These are compact workspaces in Gallery 2 with 24/7 access. Suited to artists working with visual, written or digital practices who are comfortable in a semi-shared space.

Studio Fees:
5.95m² - $325/month
11.9m² - $625/month

Blindside will provide professional development support including crit sessions, mentorship and curator visits. No formal outcomes are required, though artists are welcome to host studio showings.

EOIs close Tuesday 2nd of December, 11.59pm.

Link in bio for more info!

Launching this Thursday at BLINDSIDE 🚀

DEBUT XXI - an annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. DEBUT is a Blindside project committed to fostering new talent 💫

Thu 03 - Sat 26 Apr 2025
Opening event Thursday April 3, 6-8pm 🥂

FEATURING:

Georgia Naughton, Amelia Gill, La’la Zarei, Aliza Nickle, Celline Mercado, Dylan Marriott & Mythra Schwartz





loss


Celebrating its 21st year, DEBUT XXI brings together recent graduates working with traditional techniques, historical styles, or otherwise labour-driven processes, representing a shared affinity with artisanal notions of artistic value ✨

This year, Blindside offered an award to graduates from RMIT, MADA, and VCA. All Debut artists received an artist fee, curatorial advice and technical assistance as part of the four week exhibition ✨

CURATED by Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Veronica Charmont

Announcing DEBUT XXI - an annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. DEBUT is a Blindside project committed to fostering new talent 💫 Launching next week at BLINDSIDE 🚀

Thu 03 - Sat 26 Apr 2025
Opening event Thursday April 3, 6-8pm 🥂

Celebrating its 21st year, DEBUT XXI brings together recent graduates working with traditional techniques, historical styles, or otherwise labour-driven processes, representing a shared affinity with artisanal notions of artistic value ✨

FEATURING:

Georgia Naughton, Amelia Gill, La’la Zarei, Aliza Nickle, Celline Mercado, Dylan Marriott & Mythra Schwartz





loss


This year, Blindside offered an award to graduates from RMIT, MADA, and VCA. All Debut artists received an artist fee, curatorial advice and technical assistance as part of the four week exhibition ✨

CURATORED by Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Veronica Charmont

⛓️‍💥✨ Q***r Theory Reading Group – Session 3! ✨⛓️‍💥

Come along for the next reading of q***r theory on Thursday, April 10 at Blindside Gallery! This month we’re joined by and pulling apart “Sexual Aberrations”, from Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

In 1905, Freud presented a theory of s*xuality and gender that remains radical by today’s standards. We’ll explore how he was able to do this and discuss the potential relevance of his ideas in understanding our own experiences of s*x and love.

Alexander Powers aka Female Wizard is a DJ, musician, and performance maker based in Melbourne/Naarm.

📅 Thursday, April 10
⏰ 6:30–8:00 PM
📍 Blindside Gallery, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne

💡 No homework – we read together!
🌈 All welcome – come as you are!

🔗 Register via the link in bio

Design by 💕

See you there! 📚🕺

GALLERY ACTIVATIONS OPENING at BLINDSIDE ✨

ASHE & WET COLLECTIVE

19th - 23rd MARCH

Opening and Performances on Thursday 20th March 🕺

Untitled (cum dolore)

Ashe



Untitled (cum dolore) is a durational performance that navigates the fragility of the body within rigid social structures, exploring love, gender, and the politics of intimacy. The work conjures power and desire through the evolving relationship between body and structure, balancing endurance and unpredictability against stability. Through the poetics of gesture and form, the performance heightens the tension between control and collapse. Anchored in the vulnerability of visibility, Untitled (cum dolore) reveals the precarious balance between resilience and surrender.


Schedule of Performances:

Thursday 20th March from 6:30pm
(ARRIVE BY 6:00PM)

Saturday 22nd March from 2:30pm

There will be no live elements within the installation outside of the performance times during gallery opening hours. Installation with performance residue only.

AND …

CRUISING
WET Collective

Sylva Storm, Charlie Rydzewski, Cornelius Wong
rydzewski homunculus

CRUISING is a s*xy, juicy, silly, soggy, playful exploration of the q***r body, hospitality and the illicit. Come eat cum, spy on us and hold us as we cruise through matter.

Spread over several days this work is part food service, performance, visual art exhibition and peep show WET investigates the body in public space, desire, and hospitality through performance practice. WET are a collective that supports each other in the creation of new, experimental and often ephemeral works with a focus on socially engaged practice.

Schedule of Performances:

Thursday 20th March from 6:15pm
(ARRIVE BY 6:00PM)

Saturday 22nd March from 2:00pm

Sunday 23rd March from 12:00-6:00pm

There will be no live elements within the installation outside of the performance times during gallery opening hours. Installation only.

Image 1. Ashe, Un. (IGMWHID) (2025), digital image. Courtesy the artist.

Image 2. WET Collective, Promotional Poster for CRUISING, 2025.

GALLERY ACTIVATIONS COMMENCING THIS MONTH✨

5 - 15 March
Opening Event: Thursday 6th March, 6-8pm 🥂

A series of public programs across 10 days! ✨

Recess by Leili Walker & Rachel Button

This activation embraces the chaotic, fragmented, and irreverent spirit of the internet age. Inspired by a pilgrimage to the prehistoric painted caves of Spain and France, Button envisions the cave as a recess — a temporary suspension of time and activity. Meanwhile, Leili sees the internet as a portal of perpetuity. Together, they explore the cave and the pixel as timeless places—untouched, endless, magical, and sinister, teetering on the edge of the sublime. Their work blends prehistoric futurism and futuristic prehistory, asserting a wild poetic logic that defies reason.

AND

Fruiting Bodies Collective: Rituals for Uneasy Species
Featuring Madeleine Collie, George Criddle, Brodie Ellis, Andrew Goodman, Zoë Scoglio, & Adele Wilkes, this collective invites you to explore ecology, q***rness, neurodiversity, and coloniality through emergent practices. Join them for moments of collective sense-making and alternative forms of connection.

Upcoming Programs 🌟🌟🌟

1: Human – Sat 8th March, 1-6pm
An open studio day of multisensory experimentation and ritual. Engage in collaborative material practices, botanical tea-making, incense crafting, tarot readings, and more. Explore the relationships between the human and more-than-human through sensing, sense-making, and scent-making.

2: Lichen – Thu 13th March, 6:30-8:30pm
In collaboration with the Q***r Theory Reading Group, this ritual includes a discussion of Q***r Theory for Lichens by David Griffiths, followed by a dusk lichen hunt in the city. RSVPs essential.

3: Blackberry – Sat 15th March, 2-5pm
Explore generative/resistant practices through dyeing techniques using blackberry leaves, berries, and branches. Dive into messy conversations and embodied play around the coloniality of invasive weeds. Limited capacity—RSVPs essential.

Activation Closes: Sat 15th March

Image 2:
Fruiting Bodies Collective, Fruiting Bodies Solstice Forage (detail), 2024

We’re pleased to announce an exciting off-site exhibition at Photo Access Gallery, Canberra, curated by BLINDSIDE’s current gallery coordinator, Madi Sherburn, and former chair and artistic director Karl Halliday ✨

COUNTER-SITES
6 March - 5 April 2025
Opens Thursday 6 March from 6-8pm

COUNTER-SITES brings together the work of seven artists whose practices dismantle, dissect and disrupt the complex connection between photography and place, image and site. Looking inwards to the properties of the medium itself, and outwards to the politics of vision, the exhibition extends and confuses the traditional-spatial experience of image through critical, archival and expanded approaches to photography.

This entanglement with place, especially in Australia where the camera performs a complicit service in the colonial project, is problematic. Since constructing an image of the Australian landscape - whilst definitive to its national identity - maintains European myths of settler sovereignty and justifies extractive attitudes, erasing long standing Indigenous knowledge. Photography gives significance to sites, marks and maps territory, and embellishes landscapes with narratives, all the while itself remaining nomadic, severed from the specifics of any singular space, a para-site, capable of being reproduced across multiple contexts at once.
COUNTER-SITES uproots dominant notions of situation, settlement and landscape to ask how we might reimagine our relationship and responsibilities with where we stand.

Artists:
Isabella Capezio .
Aaron Claringbold & Rebecca McCauley .
Matt Dunne .dunne . Nicholas Mahady mahady .
Christine McFetridge .
Jahkarli Romanis .

counter-sites is curated by
Karl Halliday & Madeleine Sherburn .

Text contribution by
Mackenzie Lee .



Photo Access Gallery
Manuka Arts Centre
30 Manuka Circle,
Griffith, ACT, 2603

BLINDSIDE PRESENTS OUR LATEST SCREEN SERIES 👀

From the View Finder
Curated by Veronica Charmont

Presenting Films by Matthew Berka, Giles Fielke & Paddy Hay, Lucy Helen Kostos, and Julia McInerney

A series of four films by filmmakers dedicated to working with the medium of analogue film. Each filmmaker is a past or present member of non-for-profit artist collective Artist Film Workshop, an analogue film lab based in Brunswick East that provides access to analogue knowledge and resources for filmmakers and artists.

The tactile medium of film holds a unique ability to preserve, capture, and create moments in moving images across time and space. Through this medium a collective convergence of ideas emerges between the four films. They examine our relationships with local and distant landscapes, and consider how these environments intertwine with notions of identity, family and community.

View the Films Online
Only Until 30 April 2025







-

Image Credit 1:
Matthew Berka, still from Hume’s Disappointment, 2016, Super 8mm shown as video, 11:02 min

Image Credit 2:
Julia McInerney, Joanna (film still), 2022
16mm black and white film
10 minutes 20 seconds

Image Credit 3:
Lucy Helen Kostos, still from Ithaki, 16mm still, 2019

Image Credit 4:
Giles Fielke and Paddy Hay, still from The Gardens, 2022, 16mm black and white and colour, sound, 7 mins

⭐️CALL OUT⭐️ - Board Member, Fundraising Coordinator

The Fundraising Coordinator drives our annual calendar of fundraising events, manages our donation platforms and nurtures donor relationships. This work is crucial to ensuring Blindside’s ongoing sustainability, and plays a key role in our financial strategy.

We are seeking candidates with philanthropic and fundraising experience, and our ideal candidate has extensive stakeholder engagement experience.

For more information and the full position description please see the link in bio.

To apply, send a cover letter and CV to [email protected] by Wednesday March 5th. Interviews will be held in the second week of March.

✨✨✨

Final days to see 👀

You Can Use My Phone
Jemi Gale, Sol Fernandez ☀️
30 Jan – 1 Mar 2025

BLINDSIDE G2

In You Can Use My Phone, our walls speak, low and warm, blending little hands, big thoughts, and all-encompassing feelings. This exhibition, both new and familiar, is an offering of depictions that rise from the shared voice of Aunty Jemi Gale, Sol Fernandez, and her children and collaborators Blu and Zeia Fernandez Nitor-Zammataro. Here, paintings are not just seen; they are felt — reaching out to little hands. Intended to be felt by the crawling, toddling, wide-eyed, and those who care for and live amongst the young.
galea.m.a.s.o.l


Images courtesy of the artists. Photos by Sebastian Kainey

Closing this Saturday at BLINDSIDE G1 ✨

Hell is full of good meanings but heaven is full of good works

Amy-Jean Mitchell, Dean Ansell, Eric Della Bosca, Stefa Panoschi, Tiana Jefferies
30 Jan – 1 Mar 2025

Hell is full of good meanings but heaven is full of good works is an alternate proverb to The road to hell is paved with good intentions, both referencing the necessity for not only having or speaking positive intentions but enacting them. This exhibition is a continuation of The road to hell is paved with good intentions, a group exhibition shown at Carpark Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane in August 2024. While the original exhibition highlighted more the inevitability of the promise of eternal damnation despite the best of intentions, Hell is full of good meanings but heaven is full of good works aims to discover and aim towards a sense of freedom and utopia outside of the restrictions of a prevalent narrative, found through the perseverance and ingenuity of f*gs (...and associates).

ansell





Images courtesy of the artists. Photos by Sebastian Kainey