Reaching inside your insides inside your insides inside your insides inside your insides inside your insides inside your insides
⬤ Void_Melbourne 22 Oct - 19 Nov 2022
Should there be “players” and “livers”, art and life, or only one thing?
—Wyndham Lewis, The Art of being Ruled, 1926.
Void_Melbourne opened in early 2022. Located above a 7-Eleven on Bourke Street in a building bracketed by fast food chain stores and second-rate beauty salons, the gallery is only a short walk from the CBD’s art scene mainstays Neon Parc, Tolarno Galleries and the iconic Nicholas Building. By the gallery entrance sits a black imitation Barcelona chair (very Patrick Bateman) and a mis-matched narrow white table, sufficing as the admin station for gallerist, Paul Handley. When I visited, the door to the second-floor balcony was open, allowing the calamitous reverberations of a freedom fighter protest below to roll in with the heavy spring air. Although Void_ is a commercial gallery, it has a subversive edge common to the grungier artist-run spaces in Melbourne. There are observable cracks in the walls and the curatorial impetus leans into art that’s a little gritty and ambivalent.
Tara Heffernan is a blind art historian currently completing a PhD (Art History) at the University of Melbourne on the work of post war Italian artist Piero Manzoni.
