2023 Artist Editions

In the fourth year of Blindside’s commissioned Artist Editions, we are thrilled to present limited edition photographic works by J Davies, Amos Gebhardt, and Shea Kirk. Collectors can now own a work by these leading Australian artists at an affordable price – prints are available for $390 unframed in an edition of 25 + 2AP, with 50% of the sale proceeds going directly to the artist.

Printed by THIRDS Fine Art Printing.

J Davies

Reuben & Jackson (2022), 35mm photography, 29.7 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist and James Makin Gallery.

“My work is inspired by love, lust and my everyday life. I use photography as a tool to document my life and the people I share it with; made up of many inspirational queer and trans angels who I call my whānau (family in te reo Māori). I’m honoured to be showcasing work that celebrates and highlights queer and trans joy for any and all people who can relate or find connections within my photographs.

“As a queer, agender, takatāpui artist, I am so proud to be part of a community here in Naarm (Melbourne) that not only supports each other, but celebrates each other. My work depicts what contemporary queer family is; how we look, how we live, how we love. We’re loud and proud and super gay. My work explores identity, intimacy and neurodiversity, but at the core it’s about celebrating life and remembering to romanticise it; to find fragments of lust and of love in everyday life. Through collaboration, my work aims to unpack social stigmas surrounding our queer bodies and sexuality. To celebrate our connections and our differences, to show how many wonderful ways there are to love and to live.” - J Davies

J Davies is represented by James Makin Gallery.

Amos Gebhardt

Water #6, Evanescence (2018), Inkjet print on archival paper, 27 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries.

Forty dancers move in endless cycles across four Australian landscapes; a salt lake, rock formation, lunette, and waterfall. Here on Boorong country. The figures rise from the ground as a material extension of the earth. Diverse in age, gender, and cultural identity; the ensemble reflects a pluralism traditionally absent from dominant screen culture. Together their personal histories bear the complex stories of arrival and belonging to this unceded place.

Amos Gebhardt is represented by Tolarno Galleries

Shea Kirk

Manisha (left and right view) from the series Vantages (2022), pigment ink-jet prints, Diptych (two prints, a left and right stereo pair), 29.7 x 42 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist.

“I dreamed of a woman in the tropical jungle. She had a parrot on one shoulder, and a sickle in one hand. She wore a blouse, petticoat and a nose-ring. I had never seen her before. But I knew she was my blood. Dreams are the means through which I can travel into the past, and collect the faces, memories and languages of the girmityas who I descended from. The girmityas were forced into labour on Australian-owned plantations in colonial Fiji, an experience many have described as ‘naraka’ – hell. My meetings with girmityas in the dream realm are iridescent. These visits radiate an indescribable all-encompassing love, reverence for the earth and old ways of being.

When these portraits were taken, I was experiencing the Year of No Dreaming. I was unable to sleep. Unable to dream. I was tormented by the waking world. I was isolated from myself. And I felt as though those guardians from my dreams had left me. But they are alive. I wear them every day in my face. No part of my physical body is my own. My eyes, lips, mouths and limbs were forged in the deserts of Rajasthan, in the jungles and plantations of Fiji, and in the wilds of the Pacific Ocean, on a three-month passage from the subcontinent to the archipelago. I wear their stories on my body.” — Manisha

Vantages is a stereoscopic portrait series shot using dual large-format cameras. Each portrait is exposed onto separate sheets of black-and-white film, simultaneously capturing two images of the sitter from different perspectives. The process is slow and methodical, enabling an intimate exchange that highlights the agency between photographer and subject. Conscious of their own vulnerabilities, they’re aware of what it means to represent themselves, and through the nature of this dual-imaging process, resist being reduced to a single vantage point.

The latest edition follows the wearable art of 2022 in the form of aprons designed by Scotty So, Katie West and HeeJoon Youn, and in 2021 with caps designed by Sanja Pahoki, Jason Phu and Stanislava Pinchuk, and in 2020 the life-changing puzzles by Atong Atem, Matthew Harris and Honey Long & Prue Stent.