Please join us for the opening celebration Thursday 13th march 6-8pm

A ladder with penises for rungs, entitled Corporate Ladder. 

Lingerie tailored from Chux cleaning cloths as satire on the way women are quantified and reduced. 

A series of pop-art inspired artworks, Why Men Smash Stuff, with stereotypical Wham’s and Blam’s replaced with words including Depression, Narcissism, Insecurity.

An exhibition of artwork by Melbourne artist Andy Drewitt, a Walkley Award winning journalist and photographer, explores themes of toxic masculinity, gender equality and male mental health. 

And those topics, Mr Drewitt says, he knows too much about.

‘I was born into a Melbourne cult that was led by men who preached a doctrine of perfectionism and enforced it with oppression, control, bullying and fear.

‘Self-expression was stifled, like in any system that is power based. Be it patriarchal hierarchy, a toxic workplace, or fundamental religion, the greatest fear is losing control. And that stifling of self-expression caused me to lose a sense of myself. My identity.’

Women fared particularly badly in the cult, Mr Drewitt said, which was founded by excommunicated members of The Christadelphian church.

‘Females weren’t permitted to speak or pray during services and a family was excommunicated because the wife was considered to have ‘too much power’.

Fearful of excommunication, Mr Drewitt said that as a young man he bought into ‘what the cult peddled’ until he left, aged 22. 

‘I bought into what the cult peddled — it was all I knew — and in my own introverted way I developed my own brand of toxicity, tragically ending relationships with anyone who didn’t ‘measure up. And then hating myself for it.’

Mr Drewitt describes toxic masculinity as a pattern of thinking that adheres to rigid gender stereotypes, primarily that men should suppress emotions that are considered to be feminine in nature, such as vulnerability, grief, anxiety, disappointment and fear. ‘There was a time when I preferred to hurt myself than to admit that I was struggling. I came frighteningly close to taking my life.’

Mr Drewitt says that producing the exhibition helped him heal.

‘I thought that I’d healed decades ago, but when I began producing the work, all of these emotions rose in me and I felt a weight lift off, like I could finally breathe.

‘I’d been living under a shadow, and it’s taken a penis ladder and Chux lingerie for me to step out from it.’