On-Site: Lab 01 with Aaron Billings, a free interactive exhibition at RMIT First Site Gallery
RMIT PhD candidate Aaron Billings’ interactive exhibition, On-Site: Lab 01, ran from Tuesday 21 February to Friday 17 March 2023 at RMIT First Site Gallery.
The free exhibit was open Tuesday to Friday, 11am-5pm with onsite artist-run workshops conducted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30pm-3:30pm – with bookings made via the RMIT Galleries Instagram.
Billings is a multidisciplinary artist, working in Coburg’s Pink Ember Studio, that explores queer graphic narratives and perversity - through comics, quilt making, drawing, and painting.
Billings’ engagement-focused, solo exhibition explored storytelling using narrative as medium, especially drawing, ceramics and textile works, to examine queer politics, histories, public perceptions, and identities.
The colourful series which displays a decade of creativity, reinterprets societal expectations and everyday humour, and looks at queer history through a more ‘playful lens’ than history has.
The LGBTQIA+ community’s resilience and perseverance, both past and present, are paired with personal and intimate perspectives and humour to captivate gay men’s living, loving, and dying memories.
Audiences were invited to ‘join the dialogue’, at hosted workshop sessions or privately, and to submit their work to the ‘Student Gallery’, via @rmitgalleries.
The exhibition concluded with a free, onsite closing party, with Aaron Billings, 16 March 2023, from 5:30pm-7:30pm.