HMLS:004
POST GALLERY 2020 [WITH ALL OUR LOVE]
Mils Gallery
Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier
Friday 17th January 6 - 8pm
WITH ALL OUR LOVE at Mils Gallery, Sydney, featured performative substitution-painting, live on the two street-side windows, as an act of tending and care by the artists, dedicated to the gallery. This exhibition celebrated the gallery as a site for artistic communion by bringing people to its closed doors via an opening event held outside of it.
One night only event. Documentation by Anthony Hodgkinson, Visual Artist.
Links
Facebook event - https://www.facebook.com/events/583939965496310/
Gallery Website - http://milsgallery.com/
MILS Instagram - https://instagram.com/milsgallery/
Address
15 Randle St,
Surry Hills,
Sydney, 2010
POST GALLERY 2020 [WITH ALL OUR LOVE]
WITH ALL OUR LOVE by Joe and Chanelle features performative substitution-painting, live on the two street-side windows. Each artist, wearing a newly rebranded ‘Mils’ Uniform, cleans a window at 15 Randle St, Surry Hills, Sydney. Using window cleaner as a proxy pigment, and applying suds in an all-over gesture that is akin to painting, and then squeegeeing it off, Joe and Chanelle clean the windows. This as an act of tending and care by the artists dedicated to a gallery. The gesture highlights the reciprocal relationship had with an exhibition space.
The Post Gallery exhibition series is a reclamation of the former Mils Gallery, Sydney, closed since 2016. With the permission of Mils gallery director, Adriano Rosselli, a spark of life has ignited by having held a new exhibition there. The gallery remains a site for art because it still says it is on the door and window. The buildings new owners have not repurposed the space, it hasn’t been altered or used in over three years, and is still featuring all its original signage. Strangely, it is through this neglect that it can continue to operate, even now in a new manner. The gallery is closed, it can’t be accessed unless it is hired as an empty building. But it isn’t empty, it is filled with its past. Better to be outside of it, and in doing so occupy what it stands for as an exhibition space. A place ten thousand people entered for a love of community and art.
Without the prescribed experience of entering the gallery, the audience is enlisted as co-conspirators in the act of an exhibition. Attending to the opening with illicit street drinking and convos, the being there is a semi-performance in its own right.
Although abandoned, the ghost of this exhibition space has inspired a reframing of the artists’ relationship to it, and of the public’s relationship to it. The whole gallery site has become aestheticized, by a locked door. The uselessness of the space is what gives it purchase; a critical distance is obtained by being unable to enter. The gallery’s structure, vandalised glass, derelict insides, and detritus become an object to see, and something to feel about.
WITH ALL OUR LOVE celebrates the artists 7 years of exhibiting at Mils Gallery while it was open. It is the second Post Gallery exhibition since it has been closed. Inside, the first 2019 Post Gallery artworks that were sent by post from Paris remain scattered on the floor degrading. They mix in woefully with as many unreceived letters and junk mail.
Two WITH ALL OUR LOVE postcards, scribed by Adriano, have now joined the detritus.
It is a time of deliberate disappearing of the Arts at a political level, where the Australian federal government has hidden the word beneath the street. This exhibition celebrated the gallery as a site for artistic communion by bringing people visibly to its closed doors during the opening event held outside of it.