Light, texture and the Anima: A journey Through the observer
Ellen Jury, Beach Houses, 2025, 75cm x 60cm, Acrylic On Canvas.
OBSERVER a group exhibition
7–30 November 2025
Romulus Folio Gallery
Curated by Angelina Mirabito
Curatorial Statement
Observer examines the relational act of seeing, exploring how attention and perception shape our experience of the world. Guided by the Anima, the inward, reflective aspect of consciousness attuned to subtlety, feeling, and intuitive awareness, the exhibition foregrounds the interplay between observer and observed, revealing the quiet, nuanced rhythms of perception.
The exhibition opens with select works from Gerard Russo’s Luminescence series, including Verge (2022), Archer (2025) and Still (2021); spectral figures that interrogate the tension between visibility and withdrawal. Figures turn inward or stare toward unseen horizons, emphasising the subtle dynamics of gaze and presence.
Anita Mirabito’s Through the Weave (2025) is a site-specific crochet installation in graduated pinks, 180 × 120 cm, suspended from a brick wall. Fairy lights penetrate the open pattern, revealing the tactility of wool and generating a luminous, immersive experience. The work transforms domestic craft into sculptural presence, drawing viewers into attentive observation.
Andrea Vargas, a Melbourne-based Latin American artist, presents ceramic works, including, Let a fountain be my moon (2025), The Sea, Calling Me (2025) and The big wave of a start night (2025) informed by St Kilda Beach and the poetry of Gabriela Mistral. Vargas translates environmental and cultural observation into poetic, tactile forms, emphasising perception as an intimate, embodied act.
Florence Wang offers intimate oil landscapes of suburban Melbourne, Home is where the light is (2025), Corner of Brunswick West (2025) and Bottle-O (2025), capturing quotidian environments with narrative sensitivity and relational gaze. Her paintings reveal how seeing and being seen are reciprocal processes.
At the core of the exhibition, Keith Ross documents everyday gestures, a man crossing a street, Taking a punt on a Punt (2024) another standing in the middle of the road beside a parked car touching a magpie, From the bottom of my heart. Thankyou. I had no idea where I was (2024), revealing emotional complexity within ordinary life. Ellen Jury contributes a poignant domestic tableau: Beach Houses, (2025) a beach house backyard with a single pink towel on a clothesline, condensing intimacy and memory into minimal form.
Joanne Morris presents printed hyperreal charcoal works, including Feather (2025) and Balance (2025), conceived as layered, evolving multimedia prints. Each piece revisits the original painted charcoal observation, allowing Morris to embellish with additional charcoal layers. This iterative process transforms the prints into explorations of revisiting perception, inviting viewers to actively reconsider their gaze, reflect on how it is conditioned, and what they return their gaze to and revise their perception on.
As the works were installed, I developed an impact wall, Anima Mundi (2025) wall in response to their placement, composed of large palette knife strokes in pinks, whites, pearl, and golds, with materials that combine art and house paint and texture in ways that mean they will naturally crack as they dry. Rather than a defined form or focal point, the wall acts as a relational, emotive backdrop, creating breathing space between the layered conversations of the artworks. It embodies the interplay of gaze, observer, and observed, and the experience of seeing and being seen with care, attentiveness, and love. The wall’s scale, texture, and subtle variations in light allow audiences to inhabit the reflective space of the Anima, harmonising the exhibition emotionally and conceptually.
Observer invites audiences to engage with perception as an active, reflective process, highlighting the subtle, layered, and relational dimensions of seeing and being seen.