Collectives
Yoho Collective
Schoolhouse Studio, Collingwood
The Last Act
Long Division Gallery last exhibition.
OHO Collective founding members: Annette Wagner, Le Riquiqui, Astrid Mulder
March, 2021
Instagram: @yoho_collective
The name YOHO is inspired by Slovenian art movement OHO (1965-1971) which embraced absurdism, striking imagery and reism (a return of things to themselves). OHO, meaning eye (oko), ear (uho) and an exclamation of surprise in Slovenia, adopted everyday processes and approaches to encompass performance, land art, film, installation and much more, exhibited within former Yugoslavia and internationally. Our individual art practices, like OHO, look at relationships between humans and objects, within an interconnected environment. In collaboration we combine these concerns to create playful site-specific installation with film, photographic and live elements.
Staged in the Long Division Gallery at Schoolhouse Studios in Collingwood, the exhibition emerged as both a response to and a ritual farewell for a much-loved artist-run gallery resource that had long supported the local creative community. In place of the conventional white cube, the gallery was transformed into an immersive chroma-green environment. Walls, floor and backdrop were painted in the vivid tone of a studio green screen, dissolving the architectural neutrality typically associated with gallery display. Within this altered spatial field, members of the Yoho Collective activated the exhibition through a live performance that played with visibility, disappearance and collective presence. As the collective performers moved through the monochromatic environment their bodies appeared to merge with the backdrop, present yet simultaneously dissolving into it. This staging drew on the visual language of digital compositing to explore the precariousness of artist-run spaces and the ways creative communities can seem to vanish even while their cultural imprint remains. The green field became both a site of projection and a metaphor for absence: a space where artists were “there but not,” occupying the gallery while also slipping into its surface, marking the passing of the space while imagining other futures that might be composited in its place.
Deep West Collective
The ‘Deep West Collective’ is a group that has staged multiple exhibitions featuring works by six artists who met through the socially-engaged arts program (Wunder Gym) in Melbourne’s outer west on Wadawurrung and Boonwurrung/Bunurong Country.
Deep West Collective artists include:
Annette Wagner
Rhys Cousins
The Artist Known as Foot
MeiMei 莓莓 Hodgkinson
Zoe Jones
Rachel Morley
Despite the variety of mediums and processes used in their artistic practice; including but not limited to – sculpture, textiles, photography, painting and installation – these artists share the same desire of wanting to interrogate the preconceived.
Inspired by their diverse personal experiences and backgrounds, they further explore identity, body, assimilation, class, memory, infinity and the natural world. Together, their practices acknowledge and celebrate the undeniable diversity and enormous potential of the arts in the outskirts of the city.
Preconcieved Interrogations - Memory
Trocadero, Footscray
The Deep West Collective (2025)
In Preconceived Interrogations – Memory at Trocadero Projects (2025), the six artists delve into the nebulous terrain of memory, challenging the very foundations of what we recall and how we perceive our past. This exhibition interrogates the reliability of memory, dissecting the layers of nostalgia, trauma, and selective recollection that shape our understanding of self, place and history.Through diverse mediums and perspectives, the artists expose the fallibility of memory, revealing the distortions and biases that colour our most intimate narratives. This collective exploration invites viewers to question the authenticity of their own memories and consider how these distorted recollections inform their identity and worldview.
Preconcieved Interrogations - Place
West End Art Space, West Melbourne
The Deep West Collective (2024)
Their inaugural exhibition, Preconceived Interrogations – Place at West End Art Space (2024), the collective examined the idea of “place,” probing how geography, locality and lived experience shape artistic practice from the periphery. Through diverse mediums and perspectives, the artists considered how cultural production emerges from sites often positioned outside dominant art centres, foregrounding the richness, complexity and agency of regional and marginal contexts. This exhibition interrogated the assumptions embedded within notions of centre and margin, inviting audiences to reconsider how place informs identity, creative expression and community. In doing so, the artists collectively acknowledged and celebrated the undeniable diversity and enormous potential of artistic practices that emerge from the edges rather than the centre.