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69 Capel Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003

Open 12pm-5pm, Thursday - Sunday

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KINGS Artist-Run is a wheelchair accessible venue. Unfortunately, there is no wheelchair accessible toilet. Please contact the gallery with any access requirements and we will endeavour to support your visit.
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About

Kings Artist-Run provides a location for contemporary art practice, supporting distinctive experimental projects by artists at all stages of their careers.
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KINGS Artist-Run acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we operate.

We offer our respect to Elders both past and present and extend this offer to all Australian First Nations people.

two shores push back and keep us distant

Liam James
Priscilla Beck


04 November 2018–24 November 2018

It is just becoming warm enough to swim in the sea. Although usually cause for happiness, it is warmer earlier every year. The ocean warms with salt tears but it is still too cold to swim for long. That part of the sea that accompanied us to shore dries to a tight crust of salt in the sun. Lips tingle, tongue thick with the taste of it. When we leave this room, the salt from our bodies remains. Two shores push back and keep us distant.

Two shores push back and keep us distant is a ruminative investigation into art making processes and experience, allowing for an experience of art which is embodied as well as analytical. The installation presents nothing but itself, resulting in a resonating silence, where once there was intent. The slow growth of the salt room speaks to ideas about time passing and a world changing, about ownership and belonging, the presence of something or the absence of something, of people being there, or of no-one being there. A body of water. A body in the water. A body without water. We have never been so thirsty.

Between the gallery walls, the slow growth of salt, and each individual experience of the work, meaning emerges and disappears. Meaning is continually created and negated. There is activity at the edges of this, where each personal and lived experience creates new meaning from the stuff that is left behind.

See all projects by:


  • Liam James works primarily with photography, staging evocative scenes and portraits rich with references to Australian art history, his own personal identity and the wider canon of art. Each image cleverly critiques its place in this dialogue, and provokes questions from the viewer about the discomfort of belonging, and our understanding of art and history, as it is presented to us and by whom.
  • Priscilla Beck creates subtle, object based installations that work with the inherent qualities of materials and space to dictate how they will manifest. Making associations between things and things, between materials and space, between ideas and objects. There is an innate self-consciousness in each work that speaks to the problems of being human, and of being a human making art.