I have selected 7 visual artists who address queer narratives in their work in innovative ways. My interactive photographic installation and video work with composer Charlotte Rose sits alongside two photographic series by Katy Jo Carter and Melanie Church, paintings by Kestin Stewart and Eli Orzessek and comic art by Sam Orchard.
The opening night will go out with a BANG from the tantalising line up of performances that extend the themes of the exhibition from 9-9.30pm.
Here is an extract from the essay "The Spark, the Fire, and the Dark" by Joe Madonald.
Faerie Tales, as an eclectic whole, shifts the focus from singular identities to relationships and connections between embodied beings. Rather than portraying an assortment of queer identities, these collected works express an emerging fascination with bodies, narratives, intimacy, power, and relationships.
Ranging from archival photography to contemporary water-colour, from multi-media installation to comic artistry, the artists present an array of images and sound that explores the relationship between self and other, knowing and un-knowing, intimacy and identity, and insists that the viewer reflect on their own investments in gender and sexuality.
Desire and pleasure are present, but not easily consumed: the viewer is unsettled and yet simultaneously invited to savour the experience. Bodily morphology is not mapped neatly onto gender and sexuality. Emphasizing the interweaving of physical, energetic, emotional, and spiritual embodiment, bodies and intimacies are exposed as transcendent and primal, intimate yet public.
In Faerie Tales, time is variable, shifting, and storylines are interrupted. Still, there are threads of connection and continuity: these works are located here, in Aotearoa, and they explore embodied experiences, narratives, and identities through a lens of intimacy, flesh, and a queer kind of un-knowing. The viewer is privy to the making and un-making of moments, the spark, the fire, and the dark.
