October 13 - 31: Michael Ciavarella, Kiera Brew Kurec, Salote Tawale & Rosa Tato

In Gallery One is Michael Ciavarella's Hard and Fast, a collection of small-scale canvases and collages accompanied by a large, concrete sculpture on the floor. The sculpture looks like a plinth that's been dug out from the earth or retreived from the bottom of the sea. It's weightiness seems an apt contrast to the airy, sparse and [occasionally] comical wall based works.

In Gallery Two is Kiera Brew Kurec's Dead Life. This enormous festoon occupies the whole space, and emanates vaguely the sound of Easter Litanies from a Ukranian Orthodox church. The pungent odour of plant matter fills your nostrils when you eneter this darkened room, and the sensation of an organic living [or dying] presence is overwhelming.

Salote Tawale's I love you, I REALLY DO, is in the project space. This work contains two parts, a large photocopy blown up to a huge scale of a hand giving the single-finger salute. Simultaneously confronting and hilarious. On the floor next to it is a video of a woman [the artist] doing a really great dance that just makes you smile.

And finally, on the Night Screen we have Rosa Tato's Made in China. This video, comprised of photgraphic stills taken by Rosa during a visit to china, explores the comparisons and contrasts of traditional Chinese garments and the industry that surrounds them.

September 22 - October 10: FELT up, Kate Hodgetts & Sharna Osborne

In gallery one and the project space we have FELT up, the ARI swap [see below] with FELT space from Adelaide. These guys risked life and limb to cart their art over to Melbourne - and what a fantastic show. Very sculpturally orientated, with painting and video as well [even Monte's video works were presented in a spatial manner]. These artists include: Annika Evans, James Marshall, Matt Huppatz, Brigid Noone, Logan MacDonald and Monte Masi.

In Gallery Two is Kate Hodgetts' work Portable, a frenetic video in which a camera scurries through the undergrowth of a typically Aussie forest, accompanied by feedback driven electric guitar. An intense experience indeed.

The large cardboard sculpture is a part of Circuit, a multi-faceted installation by Matthew Gingold. During the Fringe Festival, this modular sculpture was installed in ARIs all around Victoria, and allowed visitors to view - via a webcam and built in modem - gallery visitors in the other venues.

On The Night Screen was Sharna Osborne's The Flummox of Equilibria 7 : Family Tree, in which the artist and several actors played out a kind of ritualistic depiction of family stereotypes, here transformed into absurd characters.

SEVENTH-Up @ FELTspace, Adelaide

So last month we folks here at Seventh packed a bunch of artworks into a tarago and cruised over to Adelaide to have a show there. After 'heading west' and finding ourselves almost at Warnambool, we realised that it was time to get a map. We promptly headed north to join the road that we should have been on the entire time, and after much sing-along singing, bottles of cider and pleasant country scenery, found ourselves in sunny Adelaide [it was night-time and raining when we got there though].

Our Exhibition was hosted by the lovely folks from FELTspace, a little ARI in downtown Adelaide - conveniently located right near some of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. The premise of our show was an 'ARI swap', meaning that once we'd shown over there, the artists from FELT would come over to Melbourne and have an exhibition at Seventh gallery. This idea proved to be very successful, and as a result we now know where the good pubs in Adelaide are.

Pictured are some of the works by artists from the Seventh gallery committee.

September 1st - 19th @ SEVENTH

In Gallery One and on the Night Screen was Christopher Koller's photographic and video installation, A One Legged Schoolteacher, Two Anarchist Bullfighters and a Poet. Koller's work is centred around a visit to the site of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Llorca's assasination.

In Gallery Two, Chris Hartnett's Blurring Boundaries presented the viewer with two visual components, a tent with a fur rug, lit from within with a floursescent light and a video on the wall displaying footage of animals dully pacing to and fro in zoo enclosures.

And in the Project Space was Jordan Wood's Evoludicrous. This menacing installation oscillated somewhere between ancient mystical talismans and post-apocalyptic totems.

Tuesday August 11, Opening Night!

'Neo Black', in Gallery One and the Project Space, featured works from Georgina Cue, Dean Thompson and Michael Staniak.

Michael Staniak explains that "this exhibition explores three unique and contrasting methods where black has been used, not so much as a colour value but more as a concept derived from science, media and popular culture".


Georgina Cue's embroideries involve a delicate portrayal of cinema noir and mysterious street deaths and murders.



Dean Thompson's painted fibreglass canvases seem to transform from solid materials to fragile, vulnerable substances.




Michael Staniak's oil paintings and fluorescent lights eerily lit the room. He explores quantum physics and black holes and the ability for scientists to re-create this phenomenon through machines.




Submerged in Gallery Two was the work of Laureen Lansdown, 'Planktos-Made to Wander'.



Playing on the Night Screen was Georgie Roxby Smith's 'Walk 8:57am<>Run 8:59am'.