77 defunct artist-run galleries: Melbourne and Sydney
The series consists of contemporary photographs taken of the sites of artist-run galleries in the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne in 2005.
The 77 galleries were as many as I was able to confirm in a year of research. Some of them are galleries I have been involved in, some were discreet or temporal projects that only a few knew about, some were around long before I was practicing as an artist.
The criteria for inclusion simply required that a gallery had to have been named and, at the time of photographing, was no longer active as a gallery. It also had to have been organised and run by artists who weren’t accountable to a parent organisation.
The lack of dates or specific locations in this index is is intentional. Rather than attempting historical 'depth', it encourages a kind of representational collapse into flattened, printed contemporaneity. The series is not meant to be informative in a documentary sense - it's more like an abstracted tabloid ‘obituary’ for a certain kind of artist-initiated activity.
 
Gallery names in red were located in Melbourne, and blue in Sydney.