Nestled between a café and a driveway on Merivale Street, South Brisbane, the eponymous Merivale Studios is easy to miss. Established in early 2024 as a space for mid-career and established Brisbane-based artists to work and collaborate, the studio has since hosted four exhibitions, a string of workshops, and even a life drawing-slash-performance art event, drawing on a wide range of creatives in the process, from local talent to visiting artists. Now, coming up on their one year anniversary, the studio is hosting its first ever group resident exhibition, showcasing a total of 43 works from 14 of the 18 artists in residence.
I visit the studios for the launch on a Thursday evening. As I enter, a plywood lightbox installation sets the tone: Steen Jones’ neon-lit silhouette of a skull, flashing in blues and greens by the door. Further inside, visitors lean against the gallery walls enjoying free beers and chatting, their shoulders dangerously close to hanging canvas. Merivale Studios clearly isn’t interested in controlling the visitor experience by enforcing viewing angles or distance from the works on display. Indeed, with so many pieces in such a small space, it’s impossible to view just one in isolation. Context encroaches, shapes meaning. Art is everywhere—even on the beer cans.
As a resident showcase, the exhibition is unthemed, which gives it a wonderfully eclectic feel. Some of the works are familiar, such as Aurora Campbell’s Inner Territory (on display at the artist’s identically named solo exhibit last August), but others are totally new, products of the past year spent in the adjoining studio space. As I walk around, a burst of colour catches my eye, and I stop in front of a photograph of a clown, still in full wig and makeup, reading a magazine on a busy city street. The photo is surrounded by intense, black-and-white shots of music royalty like Josh Homme and Denzel Curry, backstage and mid-performance. The juxtaposition is playful and suggestive—who do we capture on film, and why?
Back by the entrance, Jordache Gage’s abstract piece PINNOP (Patterns in Nature, Nature of Patterns) meshes geometric patterns with bold brushstrokes and vivid colouring. A handful of other works in the exhibition also flirt with abstraction, such as Charlie Maycraft’s series of ambling pastels, which arrange floral and geometric motifs into a child’s drawing or a fabric pattern, or Gus Eagleton’s Roof Top Spot 17, which depicts place as uncanny smears of blue, black and white, organically intertwined on board. Other works take a more literal approach, depicting simple, everyday scenes. Tori-Jay Mordey’s ilan time is one such example, showing a young man and a dog sitting in the sun amidst a cluster of greenery. The painting is soft-edged; awash in warm, flat colours; radiating comfort and relaxation. Phoebe Paradise’s A Moment is similarly interested in liminal, inside-outside spaces and the quotidian experience of climate and place. In this digital print, a black-lipsticked figure reclines in a wicker armchair, foot propped up on the railing of a balcony, enjoying a drink in front of a blazing, fluorescent sunset. It’s an image that wouldn’t feel out of place in a comic book—or on the side of a beer can.
Aside from the variety on display, the other thing that strikes me about the exhibit is its unmistakable DIY feel. It’s not only the rugged, industrial aesthetic of the gallery space that gives this impression, with its high ceiling, visible piping, and concrete-ramp entrance. It’s also the organisation of the exhibition itself. Sometime later in the night, I’m standing by the entrance when one of the works on display detaches itself from the wall and lands face-down on the floor. There’s a flurry of alarm, but Phoebe Paradise (also the studio director) slips through the crowd, brushes the piece down, and sticks it back up. You won’t catch that happening at a national gallery.
Part and parcel of this DIY aesthetic is a sincere commitment to Brisbane’s local arts community. Unlike other exhibitions that foreground Brisbane, the city isn’t a limitation here so much as a common unifier. Many of the works on display are explicitly international—such as Joey Bailey’s Lower East Manhattan Slice, a photograph of a shop awning advertising 99c fresh pizza—or delightfully otherworldly—as with Murdoch Stafford’s grungy Artillery, depicting a sword-wielding eyeball at the perfect intersection of heavy metal and D&D. Other pieces have a more distinctively Brisbane feel, like Fintan Magee’s striking oil painting, Brisbane Rorsache, which lampoons the housing market through its rendition of an iconic local building submerged by flood waters. The structure is doubled on the canvas, reflected muddily in the water below: the dream of house ownership rendered illusory. Behind a rust-coloured car, a ‘For Rent’ sign is visible, a smiling realtor peeking out over the waterline.
Magee’s work is one of the largest on display, and also one of the most expensive, priced at $8,000. But a quick glance at the exhibition catalogue reveals this is an outlier: the vast majority of works are available for triple digits, with the cheapest a mere $60, or the cost of a weekend grocery shop at Coles or Woolies. Artworks can be bought in person or online, using the QR code on the catalogue, and then picked up at the gallery to take home. With ‘affordable art’ becoming something of a buzzword, it’s refreshing to see a studio embracing what this really means: not only (actually) cheap prices, but also playful, experimental art reflecting a wide-range of creative practices and themes.
Yen Radecki is a writer and editor currently based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Their short fiction has previously appeared in STORGY Magazine, Ibis House, and Forge Literary Magazine. Online, they can be found at @yenradecki.
