Database

Ross Moore (b. 1954) is a Melbourne-based artist, academic, and writer who came to prominence in the 1990s for discussing issues around the gay body and the HIV/AIDS crisis. He was known for his banner pieces which were included in Ted Gott's *Don't Leave Me This Way* at the National Gallery of Australia. Moore's work employs popular graphics from his childhood to reconfigure current issues. Moore made a series of works dealing with kitsch representations of Aboriginal identity, tracking a difficult terrain, Moore as a non-indigenous artist made parallels between experiences of homophobia and racism. Moore's artworks are unashamedly an act of activist art, his black and white banner *Sodomized* (1995) skillfully conflates issues around HIV/AIDS, gay male sexuality, right-wing politics, pop culture, and health. Moore is now predominately a writer and academic working at the Australian Catholic University.

Ross T. Smith (b. 1961) is a Ngāpuhi/Māori photographer who has lived between both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Smith studied fine art photography in Melbourne at the Australian College of Photography Art and Communication between 1987 and 1990. In particular, Smith is known for his photographic series such as *Hokianga* (1997–98), held in the permanent collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and *Hemi Tuwharerangi Paraha* (1999) in which these two bodies of work position the image of young Māori men and women within the remote New Zealand landscape. In these complex series of portraits, Smith depicts the figure in varying states of strength and fragility, eschewing evocative documentary portraiture to consider the restrictions of identity and representation in a marginalised group. Smith is known within Australia for his large-scale photographic composition *L’amour et la mort sont la même chose* (1990–92), held within the National Gallery of Victoria collection and exhibited within *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* (2022), *TRANSMISSIONS: Archiving HIV/AIDS, Melbourne 1979–2014*, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2014), and *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS* (1994), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Smith's work is held in various Australian, New Zealand, and international collections.

Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) was an Australian modernist painter who is most widely recognised in Australian art history for his radical experimentations with “colour-music”. He has been credited as being one of the first settler artists to use pure abstraction. His later figurative work was heavily influenced by Cubism. De Maistre initially studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, later enrolling in classes with Antonio Datillo-Rubbo at the Royal Art Society where he started painting in a style influenced by post-impressionist artists like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. After briefly serving in the Australian Army during the First World War, de Maistre was inspired by the colour-therapy treatment administered to shell-shocked soldiers. De Maistre emigrated to London in 1930 where he continued to make work along modernist lines. He met Francis Bacon in London in 1930, the two shared a love for French art and culture. Bacon and de Maistre were briefly sexually involved in the 1930s, and occupied studios at Carlyle Studios on King’s Road, Chelsea. De Maistre's portrait of Bacon was made in 1935. It was while de Maistre was in London that he met Australian novelist Patrick White, with whom he also had a brief affair. The two became close friends, with de Maistre serving as an "aesthetic and intellectual mentor" to White[1]. He painted a portrait of White in 1939. De Maistre exhibited at numerous galleries and was given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960. His works are held in major museums and collections in Australia and internationally, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Tate Britain. [1] Elizabeth Webby, "Patrick Victor (Paddy) White (1912–1990)", *Australian Dictionary of Biography,* Vol. 8, 2012.

Ruth Hollick (1883-1977) was a Melbourne based artist and photographer who studied at the National Gallery School and was taught by Frederick McCubbin. In 1908 Hollick began her career as a portrait photographer particularly focusing on group portraits of families, especially mothers with their children. In 1918 Hollick and her partner Dorothy Lzard took over a studio in the Auditorium Building at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. Later occupying a whole floor of Chartres House at 163 Collins Street. During the 1920s and early 1930s in partnership with Lzard, Hollick became a highly successful society and fashion photographer in Melbourne. As well as her images regularly appearing in the pages of *Table Talk*, the *Bulletin*, *Lone Hand*, *Home*, and the *Australian* magazine. Her work was also regularly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including the Chicago Photographic Exhibition and London Photographic Salon of 1927 and the Amateur Photographer Overseas Exhibition in London in 1932. Hollick’s career was significantly effected by both the Great Depression and World War II and although she continued to work out of her home studio in Moonee Ponds she didn’t attain the same success as she did in the 20s and 30s. Much of her work has since vanished as it predominately circulated in the domestic sphere, however, she is still regarded as one of the most prolific Australian female photographers from the period.

Sarah Poulgrain's (b. 1992) practice draws on self-sustainability and artist-led pedagogy to expand what art institutions can do. Though Poulgrain produces sculptures, their practice is primarily concerned with building and sustaining respectful and non-hierarchical relationships. Poulgrain learns a new skill (usually through interest-specific community groups), documenting the process and re-teaching the skill to others. Their practice aims to facilitate a model of knowledge sharing that disrupts power dynamics and prioritises vulnerability and trust. In the series of works, A set of new skills, Poulgrain has taught weaving, welding, chair making, hat making, and aluminium casting, with accompanying exhibition outcomes. Poulgrain is currently in the process of building a pontoon houseboat: a roofed structure on a pontoon base that will serve as both an art space and a space for Poulgrain to live. This iterative project engages boat-builders, lead-light-makers, contemporary artists, ecologists, and people currently living on houseboats. The aim of this project is to create a climate and gentrification resilient ARI for Meanjin experimental art, untying the contingency of art spaces on real estate rental markets.

Scott Redford (b. 1962) is a highly significant and influential gay Australian contemporary artist who has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. Redford's work is rooted in his hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland and heavily draws from Australian vernacular culture. Redford's work reflects his own position on personal and cultural identity in Australian art. His work has often addressed gay male desire and the politics of HIV/AIDS – himself HIV positive. Redford's photographs of urinals are emblematic of this. These images importantly highlight gay cruising culture at a time when gay desire was predominately contextualised via disease. Redford's work often riffs on the mainstream emphasis on youth and beauty in gay male culture. Redford has exhibited widely and is represented in most state museum collections in Australia. In 2010 Redford had a major summer exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. In 1992-3 Redford co-curated with Luke Roberts an exhibition entirely of gay male artists called *You are Here* at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, which also toured to the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. This was the first exhibition of its kind in Australia.

Shannon Brett (b. 1973) is a proud Wakka Wakka/Butchulla/Gooreng Gooreng artist, designer, educator, researcher and curator, currently completing a PhD in Social Justice at the Queensland University of Technology in Meeanjin/Magandjin (Brisbane). Their research on whiteness responds to systemic racism and misogyny in Australia from decolonial and black feminist perspectives. Brett is a current member of the Contemporary Aboriginal Art Collective proppaNOW, and also Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Modern Art in Meeanjin/Magandjin (Brisbane). They hold a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art from the Queensland College of Art and have worked in numerous arts institutions throughout Australia.

Sir Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century, best known for his interpretations of Australian historical figures including the explorers Burke and Wills, Eliza Fraser and the bushranger Ned Kelly. His Kelly saga features highly stylised depictions of the bushranger and the Australian landscape and serves not just as a historical account, but also as a catalyst to explore themes of love, myth, and identity. Although Nolan studied at the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Art in the 1930s, he was essentially self-taught and was well known as a voracious reader. From 1938 he was supported by art patrons John and Sunday Reed. Their house, ‘Heide’, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg (now Heide Museum of Modern Art), was a meeting place for Melbourne's avant-garde, and where he first began his affair with Sunday Reed. In 1951 Nolan moved to London and remained living in England until his death in 1992 at the age of 75. "Although Nolan’s primary relationships were all with women, in 1947 Nolan referred to himself as ‘ambidextrous’ (his word for bisexual) to poet and editor Barrett Reid. Not long after meeting Reid, Nolan depicted himself in a portrait as Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet and lover of poet Paul Verlaine. By this time, Nolan’s ménage à trois with the Reeds had run its course." - Art Gallery of New South Wales

SJ Norman (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker. His practice is counter-disciplinary and formally promiscuous. His body of work to date has included more than 20 works of long durational performance, and a significant body of other work embracing sculpture, photography, textiles, film and spatial audio. He is also the author of one book of fiction, with a second forthcoming. His work across forms is connected by a deep and abiding pre-occupation with the body and its mysteries, a concern originating from his foundational training in dance and theatre, as well as his Indigenous, queer, trans and disabled subjectivities. For his work in the fine arts, performing arts and literature, Norman has been the recipient of numerous awards, including: the 67th Blake Prize (formerly the Blake Prize for Religious Art), a 2018 Sidney Myer Fellowship and a 2019 Australia Council Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial. His acquisition history includes major public collections, such as the National Gallery of Australia. His first work of fiction, *Permafrost* (UQP, 2020), won the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Prize for Unpublished Manuscript. It was listed for 6 major literary awards upon publication, including the Australian Society for Literature Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2 categories, and the Stella Prize. He was awarded the 2022 Peter Blazey Prize for Non-Fiction for his essay *The Salt Lake*. He has been listed in many other prizes for prose and verse, including the Elizabeth Jolley Prize for Short Story and twice for the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. He works extensively as an independent curator of performance, music, public discourse and pedagogical programs. He has run workshops and masterclasses at many institutions, including Pratt Institute, Princeton University, University of California and the Center for Art and Research Alliances (CARA). In 2019, he initiated the Indigenous-led, queer-focused interdisciplinary arts and pedagogy platform Knowledge of Wounds, which he continues to co-organize with Dr Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation Citizen) since 2019. He is a transmasculine Koori, born on Gadigal country. His maternal ties are to north-western Wiradjuri and Ngyiampaa-Wailwan Country (the community of Nyngan, NSW) and his paternal ties are to West Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Lenapehoking/New York City.

Soda Jerk is an Australian artist duo who make sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images; how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. After living and working in New York for over a decade, they relocated to Europe in 2023. Soda Jerk’s archival practice traverses art and experimental cinema, and they have collaborated on projects with cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Their video installations and multi-channel lecture performances have been presented at art institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Whitworth Art Gallery, Barbican, Chisenhale Gallery, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, MCA Chicago, National Gallery of Art Washington DC, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Video Bureau Guangzhou, Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong and Seoul Museum of Art. Their work has also screened extensively within film festivals and international cinema institutions such as the British Film Institute and Anthology Film Archives. Their recent feature *Hello Dankness* premiered at the 2023 Berlinale and won numerous cinema awards including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, as well as the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award. It had its New York premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image as opening night film of Prismatic Ground, followed by a theatrical run at Manhattan’s iconic Film Forum. *Hello Dankness* follows their controversial political revenge fable *Terror Nullius*, which was disowned by its commissioning body, who called the film “UnAustralian”. *The Guardian* named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian movies of the decade.

Spiros Panigirakis is interested in the way in which presentational devices, furniture and organisational frameworks influence the construction of meaning, form and sociability. He has long engaged the role of the studio as a space of production in which results of artistic ‘fieldwork’ are synthesised and transformed. This research-led practice re-envisages situations of cultural and personal significance in the form of diagrams, mappings, manuals, texts and patterns as well as sculptural referents. Panigirakis often works with groups in both a curatorial and collaborative capacity to address the sited conditions of art and, when working on an individual basis, he alludes to these issues within the content of the work. *Garden states* for example reflected on the relationships and rituals developed within the suburban gardens inhabited by Panigirakis’s parents and their peers. A functional sculpture, it contained diagrammatic drawings depicting networks of people and social systems, reflecting Panigirakis’s interest in the underlying structures of places and groups.

Susi Blackwell (b. 1969) is an Australian artist and printmaker. She was an early member of the activist print making collective Inkahoots in Brisbane in the 1980s. In 1994 she collaborated with Angela Bailey on the production of the HIV/AIDS political poster 'Dam Dykes', as part of an Inkahoots exhibition project. Elizabeth Ashburn writes, "the poster was to be have launched at the Brisbane City Hall Gallery in 1994. However, the council decided that the poster was 'offensive' and refused to hang it. It was explained to the artists by a council representative that hanging the poster would do 'more harm than good and would needlessly offend public taste" (Elizabeth Ashburn, Lesbian Art, 1996, p. 38-9). Blackwell also modelled for the 1991 poster 'Celebrating Change' by Inkahoots member Robyn McDonald, which featured a gay couple and a lesbian couple kissing and embracing (a work now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art).

Sydney Long (1871–1955) was born in Goulburn, NSW and trained in Sydney at the Art Society of New South Wales School, studying under AJ Daplyn and Julian Ashton. He began exhibiting works in 1894 and became most well known for his art-nouveau inspired depictions of the Australian landscape. “Sydney Long was a man of secrets. We do not know for certain when he was born or who his parents were. Although he married, fellow artist Roy de Maistre disclosed that the two had been lovers. The curator of a major Long exhibition in 2012 suggested that Baron von Gloëdon’s photographs of naked Sicilian boys were the inspiration for Long’s 1894 masterpiece *By tranquil waters*." - Art Gallery of New South Wales