A river runs through

About the Artist

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• About the artist

  Spence Messih is an artist living and working on Gadigal Country. His practice incorporates sculpture, installation, and text and is attuned to the nuances of materiality, pressure, and transformation. A central concern of his body of work is the ways in which knowledge is shaped and shared—how stories, whether factual, fictional, or somewhere in between, help us navigate identity and meaning. Drawing on abstraction as a tactic to explore the social, political, and ethical forces that shape gendered embodiment, he explores the malleability of language, architecture, bodies, and notions of truth—revealing their impermanence, contradictions, and ability to change.

  Messih's work has previously been exhibited at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Bungambrawatha/Albury; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane; The Museum of Contemporary Art and Artspace, Gadigal Nura/Sydney; The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne; as well as Auto Italia, London, among others. Messih’s work is held in the collections of Artbank, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and MAMA. Writing projects include Ghost-writing boyhood: A hauntology of testosterone with Astrid Lorange for the Australian Feminist Studies Journal (2025); Mathew Jones, as part of Queer Readings of the Monash University Collection (2021); and Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, with Vincent Silk for the Sydney Review of Books (2021). Messih completed a PhD titled "Double Bind: (Trans)materiality and Tactics of Abstraction" at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture in 2021.