SEVENTH Gallery

05/06/2026

Strange Powers closes 13.6.26. Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.

04/06/2026

A $100 million observation wheel that opened two years late, closed after 40 days due to structural failure, took five years to rebuild, never turned a profit, and shut permanently in 2021. The Melbourne Star still stands.

Leon Rice-Whetton’s video work ‘you are passing another…’ is drawn to it. Moving across the truck routes, port infrastructure, freeway bypasses and waterways of West Melbourne, Leon looks to the density of competing networks that cross over one another if you stay still long enough to notice. Freight logistics, failed entertainment infrastructure, bird populations, tidal waterways and the occasional pedestrian all present in the same frame.

Through extended duration, stretching and stitching footage to subtly dilate time, the work applies pressure to the habit of passing through. Birdsong cuts across the hum of trucks. A monument to engineered experience that barely functioned remains as a permanent fixture on the landscape - perhaps the most literal example of thing-power in the exhibition.

* Though recent news of a completed ‘creditor deal’ has teased the reopening of the star sometime in 2026.

Strange Powers is on now at Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.

This project is supported by the City of Yarra. 📷 Leon Rice-Whetton

03/06/2026

02/06/2026

Making Space is a project by OFFICE, investigating the evolving needs and challenges for creatives across the City of Yarra. The project is grounded in listening to the creative sector through a series of interviews with creative practitioners and a public forum.

The public forum is a chance to hear from the wider creative community about why they make work in the City of Yarra and the barriers to continuing to create in the area. There will be a short panel discussion to start the event then a facilitated discussion to hear from the broader creative sector. The outcomes of this work will be a series of publicly available recommendations on how the creative sector could be better supported to make and show work in the City of Yarra.

Panel and Public Forum
Wednesday 03 June
6pm - 7:30pm
35 Emma St, Collingwood

Panel
Arie Rain Glory
Tracy Burgess
Abigail Gilmore
Lucie Loy

02/06/2026

Following the involuntary removal of an Australian Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) to make way for power lines in her garden, Kym Maxwell turned the act of uprooting into a durational encounter with the mycorrhizal networks below ground. Where the logic of infrastructure saw only an obstacle to be removed, Kym found a dense, interconnected world beneath. A root system more complex and beautiful than anticipated, one that continued to generate new growth from each severed point.

29/05/2026

When power lines required a tree be removed from her garden, Kym Maxwell went underground.

Kym found a dense, interconnected world beneath. A mycorrhizal network more complex and beautiful than anticipated, continuing to generate new growth from every severed point. This became the grounds for a body of work about extraction, the materials of modernity and monocultural collapse, and ideas of a Monad (the source from which all other things flow).

In Strange Powers, Kym’s sculptures and drawings follow these ideas outward, from the garden, to the oil field, to the structures of power that shape both. A large drawing traces the ecology and science of the oil industry through one manmade crisis after another, reading resource exploitation through what Kym calls petro-masculinity.

Strange Powers brings this work into conversation with installations by Nicholas Burridge and Leon Rice-Whetton. On now at Seventh Gallery, Collingwood.

This project is supported by the City of Yarra.
📷

28/05/2026

The Río Tinto river in southwestern Spain runs red. Whether that’s geology or industrial ruin is still contested. Scientists, corporations, and communities still can’t agree on why and the answer determines everything.

Nicholas Burridge’s installation in Strange Powers inhabits this dispute. Swipe to read.

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton is currently showing at our space in Collingwood. Come and visit if your in the neighbourhood.

20/05/2026

20/05/2026

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton is currently showing at our space in Collingwood.

Pictured here is Nicholas Burridge’s installation, which enters the Río Tinto Mining Basin in southwestern Spain, where the river runs red. A network of electrical cables and junction boxes house vignettes of this other worldly place; photographic works printed in the river’s hyper-acidic waters, stories of scientists working in the field and a sample from Tasmania, the regions geologic twin. At the core of the work is a question that scientists, corporations, and communities still contest. Is the river’s extreme acidity a natural phenomenon, the ancient metabolic signature of subterranean organisms feeding on one of the world’s largest sulphide ore deposits? Or is it primarily the consequence of mining, and in particular the industrial devastation that followed 1873, when the British-owned Río Tinto Company Limited took control and scaled extraction? The answer determines everything. What the river is, who is responsible for it, and what, if anything, should be done. Nic does not attempt to resolve this. His work inhabits the contradiction, making visible a matter that is, all at once, geology, microbiology, industrial ruin, and living system.

This project is supported by the City of Yarra.

 

Pics courtesy of

12/05/2026

Strange Powers, with work by Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, and Leon Rice-Whetton.

We are open regular hours this week - Wed-Sat, 12-6pm. If your in the neighbourhood come see the show 😄

Pics courtesy of