My friend and writer Astara Ball covered Isabelle Concorde and I’s come along, be with the pavement art exhibition for Farrago 2025 Edition 6. Her engaging review and interview with us should give you a clearer idea of what pavement is about.
Exhibition photography by Yves Aurell
Tucked along Smith St, just a few skips away from Yah Yahs and Fitzroy’s infamous pride pathway, sits a small gallery known as Smith + Gertrude. Farrago’s own Dom Lepore and his friend Isabelle “Izzy” Concorde’s art exhibition, come along, be with the pavement, opened its eyes for the first time on Friday 26 September on Fitzroy’s streets and drew its first breaths amongst friends, family and fellow creatives.
The evening was joyful, exciting and a satisfying culmination of hard work. Over a year-long collaborative endeavour made successful by Dom and Izzy’s long-term friendship, pavement exhibited various mixed-media artworks that combined the visual aesthetic of gritty urban landscapes with written word and verse. A scattered collection of paintings, collages, digital art—some depicting furry characters—these works captured the liminality of growing up in the suburbs, representing the isolation of queer adolescence. To them, the “suburbs” were more than just residential; they were the site of their coming to be, like suburbia in all its mundane and grotesque glory. A few artworks were even sold by the end of the opening night.
On discussing the journey of pulling together the night, Dom shared that the exhibition came from an off-handed comment: “Izzy suggested we should make art together, adding that we should put together an art exhibition.” Determined, there was nothing stopping them from reaching their goal. Yet, it was also something they “needed to do”. He added, “it had to be true to who we are.” Izzy, who had previously exhibited with Lararia, came up with the title which pays homage to the band Pavement, “whose music was pivotal to this exhibition.”
Pavement allowed Dom and Izzy to “reflect on the past few years of [...their] lives, which was the foundation for this body of work that illustrates an authentic picture of growing up as a young queer person in the suburbs.” Drawing on the aesthetics of multimedia art influenced by the musical acts significant to their upbringing, pavement was a crescendo of their years of friendship and coming-of-age in the suburbs of Melbourne. The exhibition felt incredibly genuine and personal, but was also something refreshing and unique. “Who else is putting together a furry art exhibition in Melbourne? It just seemed so fun to be able to do something so out-there like that,” wrote Dom.
A lot of the works offered a tender and intimate glimpse into the lives of the artists too, Izzy wrote that:
“A lot of come along, be with the pavement is about loneliness. Specifically, the alienation that you feel as a queer kid in the suburbs where it’s hard to find people like you around organically.”
Creating and sharing the works that called back to the loneliness of young adulthood, the complexities of self-discovery and finding oneself must have been a brave but cathartic act. The two laid themselves bare in these works, which were received with much love and care from friends, family and passersby.
Many of the artworks featured in pavement could not only attest to Izzy’s visual art mastery and Dom’s striking poetic lyricism, but undoubtedly capture the suburban gothic. I particularly liked a piece titled ‘precarious like a bunny rabbit’, an accomplished oil painting depicting an abandoned building site overgrown and graffitied; spliced alongside a train track at night. The dull colours and mundane choice of images gave character and personality to these easily glossed over locations. This was also Izzy’s favourite work, she said:
“I’m so proud of ‘precarious like a bunny rabbit’. It feels like the perfect representation of what we were trying to do with place and space... the pavement itself, the isolated, lonely suburbs we grew up in. It captures that mix between hope and melancholy perfectly too, I think.”
‘You can make me feel bad’, a large solo work by Izzy was also really cool. It collaged an image of plants growing over a wall, and included found objects such as a discarded Marlboro Red cigarette pack and cautionary “fragile” tape. Tongue-in-cheek text from a delivery parcel covered the breasts of a blonde furry character with the words, "the panel MUST be inspected IMMEDIATELY on delivery” in sharp red and white. This piece captured a humour and edginess that was echoed in other works depicting written graffiti and images of grungy urban life. Reflecting on this unique aesthetic, Izzy wrote:
“We wanted to draw upon the things you see on your walks to and from school, bus stops, train stations, shopping centres; the kinds of things you put significance on when you're so in your head ... finding meaning in the mundane.”
Another interesting artwork was ‘how to make an electric guitar sad’. Aside from its wonderfully poetic title, the experimental work showed a deteriorating photograph of a powerline with a rough outline of an electric guitar, the powerlines serving as its strings. This work was a collaborative effort which emphasised the seamless teamwork of the two, on this Dom said:
“We're on the same page artistically ... It’s been a blessing because not everyone has that harmonious, creative relationship ... We were able to push each other creatively in ways we wouldn't have been able to if working individually.”
The collection became an homage, not only to urban adolescence but to the cold but welcoming pavement itself: “When we plant our feet on the pavement, we are grounded” (the exhibition’s “mantra”). With a childhood where community can be found outside of the streets you walk on; younger generations are granted the distinct opportunity to share themselves online. Dom and Izzy met each other on the social platform Discord in 2020 through a mutual friend and stayed in touch due to their shared interest in art and music. Online communities have always been valuable spaces to foster connections and solidarity for those at the fringes of society, and much of this exhibition underlined the online communities important to Dom and Izzy; this included the furry community.
The furry culture is “gravely misunderstood” Dom acknowledged, for them the community, “boiled down to its simplest form, is liberal self-expression’. Many of the artworks in pavement featured Dom and Izzy in “fursona” form, “a colourful way of expressing yourself”. Izzy highlighted the community’s value to coming out and exploring her gender identity and self:
“Being a transsexual teenager who had no avenue for medical transition for my adolescence and most of my puberty, being able to create a sort of avatar for myself and to be able to live vicariously through her, someone who could look however I wanted to, was an important respite for a young me. It was escapism then, projecting an idealised version of myself into the online spaces I inhabited.”
As someone unfamiliar with furry culture, hearing their words and seeing these works was eye-opening. Another exciting part of the opening event was the various musical performances from emerging young musicians and friends of Dom and Izzy. This was also an important part of the development of the works featured. “At the core of the exhibition is music. Our art practices are very musically-driven. I find any opportunity to listen to a song when I can,” Dom said. The first band Deer Life brought attendees—spilling out onto the street—into the metaphorical garage of the exhibition’s urban home, with rough rounded vocals reminiscent of King Krule and the indie melodies of Car Seat Headrest and Alex G. The second performer Halfsunk offered an experimentalist, electric atmosphere to the exhibition, and Clara Darcy and the Medicine Women led the night into a folky, ethereal close.
With the exhibition’s concept emerging from the nostalgic music of the external creative places they grew up with, indie-rock performers such as Archers of Loaf, Dinosaur Jr. and Title Fight were cited by Dom as encapsulating the experience of blooming in the suburbs. He also mentioned electronic music such as Mount Kimbie, Baths, Underworld and hyper-pop underground internet acts such as Drain Gang and Jane Remover for Izzy, all which “collectively soundtrack” the visual world of pavement. “The music that reflects who we are,” he said, alongside the art that bears this journey.
Exhibiting at Smith + Gertrude was the next big step for Dom and Izzy. “Dom and I have our own sizable space for our artwork|s] where anyone can come in,” Izzy said. Strangers were given the opportunity to enter their urban adolescent world and over the week-long exhibition. 15 out of the 24 artworks were sold—many purchased by new faces. The opening night of come along, be with the pavement was a delightful and intriguing gaze into the world of two emerging artists paying tribute to the communities that nurtured them and enabled their hard work to speak for itself, firm and constant as the pavement all round.
come along, be with the pavement exhibited at the Smith + Gertrude Gallery from September 26th to October 4th, 2025.