The Thousands

You’ve probably heard about the reading room, or at least heard of the initiative that has allowed it to happen – Renew Adelaide. the reading room is a library, and a place to hang out and play scrabble, and there are regular movie screenings, and on top of all that, the reading room is a gallery too. It’s not always easy to show art in a space that is used for a variety of creative and/or hair-brained schemes. But multipurpose spaces allow undergraduate art students, amateur creatives and anyone with a little bit of initiative to cut their teeth in the art world.
 
There is no better situation in which to learn how to hang work than surrounded by bookshelves, fairy lights, zines and debris – otherwise known as the paraphernalia of interdisciplinary art. I should know – last year I ran a gallery in the old shoebox Format zine store which was actually just a spare room in the Merge Magazine offices. Despite the obvious clutter, it was a great way for people with more ambition than qualifications to ‘get a track record’.
 
That’s not to say Meg Cowell and Racquel Austin-Abdullah are amateurs. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot about them. They could both be geniuses in the making. When you find a chunk of gold in the dirty streets that house ‘emerging’ artists you remember that good art doesn’t just look good in a white cube. If it’s clever enough, good art looks good in an empty shopfront-come-library-come-cinema-come-gallery.