Leon Bowers, Kitty Chrystal, Anna Devine, Virginia Guest, Gala Jane

23 July - 4 September 2026
Opening Celebration: Thursday 23 July, 5-7pm
Level 3 Project Space

MEMORY IS MATERIAL brings together five artists working across diverse media, exploring the multi-layered nature of memory. Their work explores how memory is encoded; its function in our daily lives; its intrinsic relationship to experience, trauma and identity; and how it lives within our individual bodies and collective consciousness.

Each artist engages memory through a unique lens: Anna Devine’s sculptural works use process-driven methodologies to examine the embodied nature of memory. Kitty Chrystal’s oil paintings insert queer bodies into gothic landscapes, investigating embodiment, trauma, and the politics of visibility. Gala Jane’s multimedia installations address feminist histories and the digital archive, asking how memory survives, repeats, or is distorted. Virginia Guest’s oil paintings draw from old master traditions and abstraction to probe the colonial entanglements of agriculture and land. Leon Bowers’ paintings use nostalgic references to explore and challenge questions of taste and value.

Leon Bowers

Leon Bowers (b. 1981) is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice is driven by a lifelong compulsion to draw and paint.  He completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts with first-class honours in 2025. Shaped through years of daily drawing, his work is marked by an energised, dextrous gesture and a sustained attentiveness to the seductive charge of images. Working from digital photographs and lived observation, he paints subjects that hover between allure and latent ugliness. Resisting distinctions between high and low culture, his paintings explore figuration through banal objects and intimate scenes, in which personal memory, cultural debris, and art-historical references intersect.

Kitty Chrystal

Kitty Chrystal is a visual artist working on unceded Wurundjeri land, primarily using oil paint to explore figuration as a site for queerness, trauma and embodied experience. Drawing on aesthetics of glamour, labour, self-performance and risk, their paintings depict sexualised bodies navigating the unstable space between fantasy and survival. Chrystal’s painting practice varies between loose brushwork, imbued with speed and play, and a more tightly rendered style, informed by the history of traditional figurative painting. Through shifting perspectives, charged uses of light and shadow, and an emphasis on movement, Chrystal turns to camp as a strategy of amplification, pushing femininity until it becomes unruly, glamorous, and strange.

Anna Devine

Anna Devine (she/her) has recently completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. She works primarily in porcelain and paper, exploring the mind-body connection and the spaces  – physical, emotional and the metaphysical in-between - where consciousness is created and memory lives. Driven by a deep interest in the embodied nature of memory, she hand-builds human bones in porcelain, imbuing the material with a thought, an emotion or a memory. Externalised outside of the mind and body, they can be altered, sometimes permanently.

Virginia Guest

Virginia Guest’s painting practice is driven by sustained engagement with material, process, and abstraction. Guest approaches painting as a negotiation between control and chance, where colour, light, and surface operate as both physical matter and perceptual experience. Through layered oil paint, she explores instability, environmental tension, and the accumulation of time. Paint is built up and disrupted to form surfaces that function as both structure and residue. Mark-making is the result of repetition and restraint rather than predetermined imagery. Erasure functions alongside accumulation, allowing absence to carry equal weight. Ultimately, my work treats abstraction as a means of sensing, capturing atmosphere and tension rather than fixed representation.

Gala Jane

Gala Jane (she/her) is an artist, feminist and text enthusiast. She uses bold text, performance and humour to explore themes of women’s safety and mental health. Gala holds a Bachelor of Art and Design from Southern Cross University in Lismore and is currently undertaking a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts.

In 2023 Gala received a Regional Arts NSW grant to tour her public sculpture "Waiting" throughout regional Australia. In addition to exhibiting in regional institutions and artist-run spaces, she continues to actively support other regional artists through her ongoing involvement with WAYOUT Artspace in Kandos, NSW. 

Image: Anna Devine, Untitled, 2025