Artists Jeana Blackert, Melissa Rolfe, and Anjella Roessler are GEXA (Geelong Experimental Arts Inc.), a collective of regionally based artists who over the past 5 years have been finding ways of working together. Working together, is a complex navigation, well known to artists, curators, employees, mothers, and friends. The weight of another’s expectations is joyful and exhausting, exhilarating, necessary and at times, crushing.

 

'Twitch' at Third Space Gallery + Digital examines the nuances of working together at multiple intersections, including through the extended development, curation and installation of the show which has been negotiated over the extended period of a year, at the tail ‘end’ of a global pandemic. Rolfe, Roessler and Blackert worked consistently throughout Victoria’s lockdowns, isolated from each other physically, but always alongside each other, collectively thinking, making, and living. They supported one another through the anxieties of covid, motherhood, precarity, and grief. The deep physicality of making together, apart, manifests now in the gallery.

 

The strength of the exuberant human form is powerfully present. From the tightly wound anxieties of adolescence—through softer, slower abstractions of bodily forms that make families, communities, cities—toward the lingering afterglow of presence, of memory, of the dis/embodied, the lost and the longed for. All of the bodies in Twitch are similarly abject, defiant, and elegant. They crouch and tower amongst one another; complex, powerful, vulnerable. Twitch is an exemplary, experimental site for the examination of relations.

 

- Sarah Jones, curator

 

@geelong.experimental.arts 

​

@anjella_roessler

@jeana_blackert

@lissyrolfephoto