Heavy Leather explores pleasure as power, resistance, and healing. Deconstructed bed sheets, clothing, jock straps, silk, rubber, bronze, and glass carry the materiality of touch and intimacy. This body of work will present dominance and submission as gestures of care and consent, inviting the viewer into a ritual space of devotion where power exchange becomes a love song. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power’, a research trip to the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and the work of feminist and queer activists, this exhibition emerges from histories of collective resistance, community empowerment, and shared practices of queer joy.

BIO

Owen Leong is a visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, photography, and video. His work explores counternarratives of queer world-making, using personal mythologies and kink aesthetics to examine power, control, and care, to reframe and reimagine identities and intimacies. His work centres QTBIPOC pleasure as an act of political agency and healing. At the heart of Leong’s practice is a belief in the power of art to transform the way we see ourselves and others.

Leong was an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, USA, in 2025. He received The Chey Fellowship in 2024 to present a major solo exhibition at IAC Western Sydney University. Previously, Leong was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize, Australia's premiere prize for young contemporary artists, and received the MAMA National Photography Prize and Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award.

Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including Singapore Art Museum, Today Art Museum Beijing, Zendai Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen, and the National Museum of Poznan Poland.

He has held artist residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Parramatta Artists’ Studios, Western Sydney; esea contemporary, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan; Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Shanghai; and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong. He has received numerous grants from Creative Australia, Create NSW, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and Asialink.

Leong’s work is held in the collections of Creative Australia, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Detached Cultural Organisation, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Newcastle Art Gallery, Western Sydney University, Swatch Art Peace Hotel Collection Shanghai, University of Salford Art Collection UK, and private collections in Australia and internationally.

Owen Leong received his MFA from University of New South Wales, where he was the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award.

EO GILL

sediment

6 June

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4 July

For Your Eyes Only presents a new series of paintings and sculptures exploring colour, light and composition through abstraction. Through the use of quintessential of broad brush strokes Lett’s most recent works trace the movement of light through space and time.

BIO

Belem Lett is a Sydney based painter who has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally and has participated in numerous art fairs including; Sydney Contemporary, Melbourne Art Fair, Spring 1883 (Melbourne and Sydney), Den Fair. Lett has won the following prizes: Omnia Art Prize (2022), Kangaroo Valley Art prize (2022), Hazelhurst work on paper award (Emerging Artist Prize 2019), The Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2010). Lett has also been a finalist multiple awards including: The Sir John Sulman Prize (2025, 2023), Mosman Art Prize, Waverly Art Prize, The Blake Prize, Bayside Art Prize, The Grace Cossington Smith Art Award, The Fishers Ghost art Award, NAB emerging Artist award, The Sunshine Coast Art Prize, The Paddington Art prize, The Lake Art Prize, The Glover Prize, Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, The Chippendale New World Art Prize, The Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize, Gosford Art Prize, Muswellbrook Art Prize, Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, Woollahra Small Sculpture prize. In 2011 Lett held a residency at the Cite International des Arts, Paris. Lett was also the founding Director and curator of Wellington St Projects, Sydney 2012-2019. Lett is represented by EdwinaCorlette Gallery (Brisbane).

PAINTERIAM brings together a new body of works that extends Huseyin Sami’s ongoing investigation into the material and conceptual possibilities of painting. Working primarily with household paint, Sami explores how colour, surface, and process can move beyond representation to become physical events and spatial

objects in themselves. Through acts of pouring, stretching, layering, cutting, and accumulation, paint is treated not simply as a vehicle for image-making, but as an active material capable of generating its own forms, tensions, and behaviours. The resulting works occupy a space between painting and object, where gesture, gravity, chance, and duration remain visibly embedded within the final compositions.

BIO

Huseyin Sami (born England, 1979) lives and works in Sydney. His practice is centred on an ongoing enquiry into the conditions, possibilities, and rearticulation of painting. Through a conceptually driven and materially experimental approach, Sami investigates how painting can operate beyond static image-making — as process, event, object, and temporal record. Working predominantly with household paint, Sami has developed a distinctive material language that explores colour, form, surface, and materiality through acts of pouring, dripping, rolling, stretching, cutting, and layering. These procedural strategies engage both the physical behaviour of paint and the broader histories of abstraction, positioning chance, instability, and transformation as central generative forces within the work. Across an expansive and iterative practice, Sami’s paintings negotiate tensions between control and surrender, intention and accident, continually opening new spatial and conceptual possibilities for painting. Sami completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours at Sydney College of the Arts in 2000, followed by a Master of Visual Arts in 2003. His work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, including Equal Area at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2018);Superposition of Three Types at Artspace, Sydney (2017); Shut Up and Paint at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2016); Vivid at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2016); and Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2004). In 2023, Sami released his first monograph surveying three decades of artistic practice. His work is held in major public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including Artbank, Sydney; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the Art Gallery of Western Australia; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

For her inaugural SYRUP exhibition Tara Denny presents a body of work exploring the archives of Edith Agnes Harrington, an in-patient turned artist at Beechworth’s Mayday Hills psychiatric unit in the mid-20th century.

Informed by historical documents and archives housed at the Dax Centre, University of Melbourne and the Collections at Museums Victoria, Denny celebrates the queer-micro figure Edith Agnes Harrington, intertwining Harrington’s historical experience with her own lived experience of psychiatric disorder. Horror Vacui creates a conversation at the intersection of neurodivergence, medical misogyny and hysteria through the vernacular of crafts and textiles. Translating to ‘a fear of empty spaces’ Horror Vacui explores the myth of the ‘mad woman in the attic’; offering a vision of embodied trauma and grief, and the healing that can follow.

BIO

Tara Denny’s practice uses her own lived experiences as a gateway to narrate historical lineages of women’s resistance that might otherwise be subject to erasure. Taking the term mad(ness) as a default, Denny delves into the cannon of archetypal female lunaticism found in literature, culture and activism exploring the ‘mad woman’ and her plural manifestations in current and past social contexts. Denny’s mad woman is descending from the attic and is ready to converse with the patriarchal structures of power that have held her in a frozen state of play.