Recent VCA sculpture graduates Josh Krum and Aden Miller didn’t know the walls of the small external laundry of their Carlton North sharehouse were lined with asbestos when they decided to turn it into a gallery space and name it Asbestos. It was pure serendipity. They shared an earlier music project by the same name and so decided to continue the legacy well before they began sanding back the walls and inhaling the toxic airborne particles. The word asbestos conjures a sense of foreboding as a curse that lies dormant for at least ten years after exposure. This sense of dread also looms in the gallery’s logo: a lower-case “a” with a fractured crater in its centre. After holding eight exhibitions at their previous Carlton location, the gallerists have relocated to a larger shed at the rear of a Brunswick sharehouse, added Britt D’Argaville to the directorial lease agreement and updated their logo (the typeface is now like ink bleeding through a well-used stamp). The scale and layout of the new shed is almost indistinguishable from Guzzler—where Krum and Miller have exhibited before—sans dirt floor.
Audrey Schmidt is a writer and Melbourne Personality.
