Seventh Gallery

An artist run space is not the most everyday appearance, but they do happen often enough in Melbourne that you have start being quite out going with your social self to see them all.
Seventh Gallery moves into video projection town, I believe largely due to the size of the space. Two and a half spaces (to rooms and a between) can often be found filled with light or in fact absent of it all together. Openings will occur every three weeks, with several return customers popping up as though locals, and the committee responsible for setting up and packing up but their hearts into it.
The pieces themselves can be a little hit and miss at times, but it’s well worth stopping in and checking it out, if only to move on quickly to the shopping opportunities around or the drinking establishments close by.

On Wednesday evening I went to the opening at Seventh Gallery’s latest exhibition by a group of five Melbourne artists. The small gallery was packed with people talking, drinking, spilling out into the street and occasionally looking at the installation, paintings and video. The video projections on the window of the gallery, the night screen, are on most nights. «When are the performance elements going to start?» This is seriously cool art and a lot of fun.
It is called Seventh Gallery because at the time that it was established it was the 7^th gallery on Gertrude St. It is an artist-​run space, not for profit exhibition space. And it often has the best exhibitions that I see when I look at the Gertrude St. galleries. The committee of artists who run the gallery make some excellent choices about interesting contemporary art to exhibit every three weeks.
There are two exhibition spaces in this small artist run gallery. There is the larger converted shop space with the front window and a smaller windowless exhibition space in the backroom, what must have once been the shop’s storeroom. In this exhibition the same group was exhibiting in both spaces.