Opening Night Reflections: The Relational Art of Seeing in OBSERVER
Acknowledgements
We warmly thank Cr. Alex Makin, recently appointed Mayor of the City of Port Phillip, for attending the opening of OBSERVER and for his ongoing recognition of creative work emerging from our South Melbourne community. We also extend our gratitude to Kate Spencer from FBIDEAs for attending and for her continued support of Romulus Folio Gallery. Your engagement enriches the dialogue between artists and community that our gallery nurtures.
Opening Night Reflections
OBSERVER opened with a profound sense of shared attention, a gathering shaped as much by conversations, gestures, and mutual recognition as by the artworks themselves. The exhibition brings together seven artists whose practices explore perception as an active exchange: the movement between seeing and being seen, witnessing and being witnessed, translating and being translated.
Gerard Russo anchors the exhibition with works that oscillate between memory, abstraction, and psychological mapping, inviting viewers to consider thresholds between internal and external landscapes.
Gerard Russo
Andrea Vargas’ The Big Wave of a Starry Night Overcomes Me (2025) meditates on the emotional crescents of everyday life, drawing viewers into a balance of movement and stillness.
Andrea Vargas
Ellen Jury, a Melbourne-based artist, contributes Beach Houses (2025) that commands our attention through her acute detail and precision, to observe, with her, a single pink towel hanging on a clothesline in a backyard. Her paintings, often drawn from spontaneous photographs, capture banal or transitional spaces, evoking both familiarity and a quiet, haunting stillness.
Ellen Jury
Florence Wang captures suburban Melbourne in intimate oil paintings, Home Is Where the Light Is, 2025, Corner of Brunswick West (2025) and Bottle‑O (2025) revealing how everyday environments reflect our own interior lives experienced within them.
Florence Wang
Anita Mirabito’s crochet installation, Through the Weave, 2025 transforms domestic craft into sculptural presence. Suspended in gradients of pink light and texture, the work becomes a tactile architecture of attention.
Anita Mirabito
Keith Ross documents everyday gestures in his works, from a man crossing a street in Taking a Punt on a Punt (2024) to another standing by a parked car interacting with a magpie in From the Bottom of My Heart. Thank You. I Had No Idea Where I Was (2024). Ross’s pieces illuminate the emotional complexity and quiet poetry of ordinary life.
Keith Ross
Framing the exhibition is Angelina Mirabito’s installation, Anima Mundi (2025), composed of palette-knife strokes in pinks, whites, pearl, and gold. Designed to crack, shift, and breathe over time, it creates a relational field, a space that holds the exhibition’s themes of mutual perception, presence, and the gentle labour of witnessing one another.
Scott Ross, Mayor Alex Makin, Angelina Mirabito
Opening night of OBSERVER was a living dialogue between artists, viewers, and the shifting conditions of sight. The energy in the room, quiet, attentive, sincere, reaffirmed our conviction: seeing is always a shared act, and art becomes most powerful when it invites us to truly meet one another in that exchange.
Visit OBSERVER
Dates: 7 ‒ 30 November 2025
Location: Romulus Folio Gallery, 55 Gladstone Street, South Melbourne, 3205
Viewing Hours: Wednesday - Friday 12pm - 7pm | Saturday & Sunday 12-5pm | By appointment
Entry: Free