Database

Jordan Azcune (b.1995) is an artist and maker based in Meanjin/Brisbane who is driven by materials and their processes. Fascinated with colour, optics, and spiritual connection, his artwork relates to the natural world, the body, and architecture. He is captivated by natural beeswax and its connection to heat, its elemental state of being both liquid, and solid. Azcune mines wax to find the limits of its potential, expanding its possibilities through colour, treatment, and processes. The outcomes of these experiments navigate the fields of mathematics, fantasy, and chance, and are paired with metals to present camp offerings that captivate and intrigue. In 2016 Azcune completed Honours in Fine Art at Queensland University of Technology. He has since exhibited in solo and group exhibitions locally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include *Heat* at Redcliffe Art Gallery, Brisbane 2022 (curated by Hannah Williamson), *Devil’s Ivy* at Metro Arts, Brisbane 2021 (curated by Sarah Thompson), *Post-Christian Camp* at Seventh Art Gallery, Melbourne 2021 and N.Smith Gallery, Sydney 2021 (curated by Michaela Bear). He has been the recipient of a range of grants including Australia Council for the Arts ArtsProjects and Individuals and Groups Grant (2018, 2022), the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artist Fellowship(2020), Arts Qld Individual Fund (2018, 2020) and has been a finalist in a range of national prize opportunities. His work is held in national and international public and private collections. He has completed research and material based residencies in Australia, United States of America and India.

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1946, Juan Davila moved to Melbourne in 1974 and has worked between the two countries ever since. Over the course of five decades, Davila has produced a uniquely provocative, powerful, and influential body of work. Since the early 1970s, Davila has used the medium of painting to engage in debates around aesthetics, politics, and sexuality, drawing on rich and varied histories from Latin America, Australia, Europe, and North America. Davila has brought to high art the visual landscape of popular culture. As a visual archive, Davila’s works are not simply reflections of a society awash with images, but a carefully articulated questioning of the hierarchies applied to cultural material, and by extension, cultures. Davila opens up the hidden tensions that lurk beneath any official history or national mythology. Davila was included in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, in 2007. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria held retrospective surveys of Davila’s work in 2006–2007. In 2015, Davila participated in The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art with a presentation of monumental paintings. A major survey of Davila’s work of the last two decades was shown at Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile in 2016. In 2018, Davila participated in the EVA International Biennial, Ireland and held a solo exhibition at MUSAC, Leon, Spain. Davila’s work is included in every major museum collection in Australia, as well as significant international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Tate, London. Juan Davila rejects the application of labels to his practice including “Queer”.

Justin Maurice O'Brien (1917-1996) was a teacher and painter born in Hurstville, NSW, in 1917. He studied with Edward Smith between 1930 and 1936. During the Second World War, he served in Palestine and Greece before being captured at Ekali and interned firstly in Athens and then Torun in Poland. In 1944 he was among a group of prisoners of war sent to Barcelona in exchange for German prisoners and soon after returned to Australia to be demobilised. During captivity O'Brien was inspired by the Byzantine art of the countries in which he was held and this influenced his own art practice. The pictures he managed to paint in Torun, with materials supplied by the Red Cross, formed the nucleus of his first Australian exhibition, held in Sydney with another ex-prisoner, his friend Jesse Martin. After the war he taught at Cranbrook School, before leaving Australia again in 1963 to spend four months on the Greek island of Skyros with artists Jeffrey Smart and Brian Dunlop. After moving permanently to Rome in 1967, he returned to Australia and held exhibitions every two years. His work is now held in State and University collections throughout Australia and in the National Gallery of Australia, as well as the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. Although O’Brien was described as "unpretentious, easy-going, loyal, and affectionate", his homosexuality "coloured his life, nearly causing him to have a nervous breakdown in his younger years" [1]. Curator Barry Pearce recalled that "he painted sweet confections of the human condition but I think he painted them as a balm for something inside himself. He held himself back sexually for a reason—partly because it was forbidden by the Catholic Church and partly because it was illegal. Jeffrey [Smart] said that Justin was an alcoholic for a reason'' [2]. [1] Marian Rotelli, Memories of Justin O’Brien, letter to Martin Sharp, 24 February 1997. Cranbrook School Archive, NSW. [2] Barry Pearce, in Steve Meachem, "Fulfilled pledge caps curator's career", *Sydney Morning Herald*, December 17, 2010.

Karla Dickens (b.1967) is Wiradjuri. Born in Sydney in 1967, the same year as the historic Referendum recognising the existence of Aboriginal people as human in their own country. Dickens’ process of self-discovery, expressed through both hardship and humour, was also a journey to understanding her Aboriginal heritage, which Professor Djon Mundine OAM describes as “ironically and literally a truly dark but noble ‘Dickensian’ life”. A careful collector of racially and sexually-charged memorabilia, and other found objects, Dickens is a caretaker over material cultures that haunt. In her assemblages, photographic, sculptural, and video installations, Dickens’ works are made to bear witness. Dickens invites us to join her, to review and re-engage with stories and histories that cannot be forgotten. In 2022, Dickens was one of eight artists chosen as part of the inaugural and landmark commission for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) | Sydney Modern Project, the largest commission in the institution’s 150-year history. She was the inaugural Copyright Agency Fellowship recipient for Visual Art in 2018, resulting in *A Dickensian Country Show*, presented at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) and *A Dickensian Circus* at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, *NIRIN*, AGNSW (both 2020), and *A Dickensian Sideshow*, at Lismore Regional Gallery and Orange Regional Gallery (co-commissioned) in 2021–22. Dickens has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and abroad with major group exhibitions including, *Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial*, National Gallery of Australia (NGA) (2017–19); *The National 2017: New Australian Art*, Carriageworks, Sydney (2017); and *Grounded: Contemporary Australian Art*, NAS Gallery, Sydney (2016). In 2018, she was a finalist in the King & Wood Mallesons Contemporary ATSI Art Prize and received an Asialink residency which she undertook at Cemeti Art House, Indonesia and Artbank in the Northern Territory in 2015. In 2023 Dickens' major survey exhibition *Embracing Shadows* opened at Campbelltown Arts Centre, spanning thirty years of practice. Her work is held in almost all major public and private national and state collections including AGNSW, AGSA, NGA, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Museum of Australia, Australian National Maritime Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and the University of Canberra.

Kate Just (b. 1974) is an American born Australian feminist artist best known for her inventive and political use of knitting. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public art projects that tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women. Just migrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1994. Just holds a PhD in Sculpture from Monash University, a Master of Arts from RMIT University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Victorian College of the Arts where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Master of Contemporary Art program. Just has exhibited her artwork extensively across Australia in over one hundred group and solo exhibitions including at the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, Artspace, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Gertrude Contemporary and Centre for Contemporary Photography. Internationally she has exhibited her work at AIR Gallery and the AC Institute in New York, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond Virginia, the Rijswijk Museum in the Netherlands, the Auckland Art Fair, Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, Sanskriti Gallery in New Delhi, Youkobo Artspace in Tokyo and Titanik Galleria in Turku, Finland. Just has been the recipient of over forty grants, prizes, fellowships, awards and residencies. She has received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria. She was the winner of the 2007 Seimen’s Prize, the 2013 British Council Realise Your Dream Award, the 2014 Rupert Bunny Visual Art Fellowship, the 2015 Wangaratta Textile Prize, the 2020 Incinerator Art for Social Change People’s Choice Award and the 2022 Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship (Visual Art). She has undertaken local residencies at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and the Australian Tapestry Workshop and been awarded numerous international residencies including Art Omi in New York, Red Gate in Beijing, Youkobo Artspace in Tokyo, the Australia Council Residency in Barcelona, the Asialink residency at Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi and a KREMS AIR residency in Krems Austria. Just's work is held in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the City of Port Phillip, Wangaratta Art Gallery, Textile Art Museum of Australia (TAMA), The Sheila Foundation and Proclaim Management Collection.

Kaye Shumack (b. 1953–2021) was an artist predominately known her street posters and photographs in the 1990s that were heavily influenced by the 1960s pop culture of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and Paul Morrissey. In 1996 Shumack’s ‘The Hard Ground Posters’ were distributed to Sydney’s inner-city Italian Cafe’s in what she described as relating to the idea of ‘latte lesbians’. Shumack’s provocative billboard poster that depicted hip and powerful lesbian women was ripped down by vandals after only two weeks of greeting traffic. Shumack made multiple posters and images for Mardi Gras parades in the 1990s. Shumack exhibited work alongside other prominent queer artists in the group shows ‘Photosynthesis’ and ‘Queerography’ (1994) at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Keemon Williams (b. 1999) is a queer interdisciplinary Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist and curator of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes a diverse range of mediums and performative elements to interrogate the relationships between location, personal histories and the manifestation of culture in a postcolonial world. His practice seeks to critically examine facets of his identity and its intrinsic tethering to the wider context of being “Australian.” Responding to realms of space and time, cultural production and psuedo-ethnic representations, Keemon views culture as an alloy, to be forged and adapted to find belonging within and beyond the self. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) from QUT, where he received the Hilde Chenhall Memorial Scholarship for Visual Art, and was selected for the 2020 edition of Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Keemon is also a founding member of ANTHEM ARI, an independent group dedicated to the celebration of BIPOC voices in the arts.

Kelly Doley (b. 1984) is a visual artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting, performance, and curatorial projects. Through a queer and feminist lens Doley's work has focused on artistic labour, authorship, historiography, and embodiment. The artist's works often draw on a grunge aesthetic using everyday, overlooked, or discarded materials with an awareness of the physicality and performativity of painting itself. Doley is known for an unapologetic approach to exploring themes of gender identity, sexuality, consumerism and the environment. Doley is a founding member of Barbara Cleveland, an Australian artist collective with artists Diana Baker Smith, Frances Barrett and Kate Blackmore. The collective takes their name from a fictional feminist performance artist recovered from the margins of Australian art history, a figure who has featured in their work since 2010. Doley has been working on Gadigal land (Sydney) since the early 2000s, Doley was born in Naarm (Melbourne) and is of Scottish descent. Doley holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from UNSW and a Masters in Visual Art from University of Sydney. Doley's thesis explored the interconnections between performance and painting. In addition to formal training, Doley was taught from a young age the craft of signwriting by her father whose occupation was a commercial artist for TV and theatre. Doley is an Alumni of the Australia Council Arts Leaders Program (2016) and artist in residence at the NSW Creative Industry Residency Program, Museum of Art & Applied Sciences, Ultimo. Recently Doley has exhibited a commission *In Memory* at Bus Projects, *Thinking Business* at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (touring nationally), *Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism* at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, MUMA’s *Art You Can Wear* project and created a collection for the NGV Design Store. Doley's works are held in various collections including the ABC, Sheila Foundation, Artbank, Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of NSW.

Kinly Grey (b. 1990) works with light, smoke, metaphysics, and feeling. Their site-specific installations poetically reimagine ways to understand the world and ourselves within it. Immersive and participatory, Grey’s works are centred on audience experience and interaction. Combining sciences, mythologies, memory, and dreams, Grey’s works are explorations of feeling and experience that intersect the intimately personal with the cosmically reflective.

Leigh Bowery (b.1961-1994) was a Melbourne-born, London-based performance artist, club promoter and designer. Combining dance, dandyism, music and outrageous fashions (of his own design) Bowery lived as a piece of performance art. In 1985 he hosted London’s outrageous and notorious club night, *Taboo* – the epicenter of young and fashionable London. His groundbreaking style influenced an entire generation of artists and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, David LaChapelle, John Galliano, The Scissor Sisters and Boy George. He is also credited as a major factor behind the new Romantic music movement that became popular in London during the 1980s. Bowery passed away of AIDS-related illness in 1994 at the age of 33. His works are held in State Collections around Australia.

Lex Middleton (b. 1962) is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer living and working in Naarm / Melbourne. His practice is mainly, but not limited to photography, filmmaking and drawing. International, Queer and local culture, history and ephemera are his references and interests. Travel and food culture also has allowed him to produce photo essays and films from India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Liam Benson (b.1980) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates performance, photography, video and textiles. His work is informed by working collaboratively with diverse communities through an ongoing conversation about how culture, sub-culture and identity interrelate and evolve.

Lincoln Austin’s (b. 1974) objectcentered art practice playfully explores the ambiguous spaces between Ideal, Material and Quantum realities. Formally trained in applied/visual art and theatre production design, their audience focused works seek to encourage active and participatory responses, often employing optical devices to reward viewers who shift their relative location to the work. They believe art’s primary public function is to prompt audiences to ask questions of the artist and themselves and define art as the physical manifestation of thought in time through effort. Austin has exhibited nationally and internationally, concurrently producing 20 large-scale permanent public artworks since 2005. Their artworks are represented in many significant public and private collections.

Linda Dement (b.1960) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist who began exhibiting in 1984. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) from City Art Institute, Sydney in 1988. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-sexual corporeality and the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted. Along with Australian artist collective VNS Matrix, Dement's work pioneered Australian cyberfeminism in art. Cyberfeminist politics and poetics used technology to deconstruct gender stereotypes in mainstream culture, and proactively situated women in relation to the rise of electronic culture in the early 1990s. Some of Dement's early works came under censorship by the Australian Government. *Typhoid Mary* (1991) was taken to the NSW Parliament as being "obscene" and subsequently came under the classification of the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature as "not suitable for those under the age of 18." *In My Gash* (1999) also received a formal "Restricted" classification. Dement's programmed and still image work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, Ars Electronica Austria, multiple International Symposia of Electronic Art and Impakt Media Arts Festivals in Europe. She is twice winner of the Australian National Digital Art Award and has been awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts. Her work is held in collections such as the Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Australian Video Art Archive, New York Filmmakers Co-op and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Lisa Zanderigo is a practicing Visual Artist of 35 years, with a Master of Visual Arts in Photomedia from Sydney University. Lisa has lectured in Photography and Visual Arts for over 28 years, including at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney and the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Zanderigo's early work was in Documentary Photography, and was inspired by the Documentary greats like Henri Cartier Bresson, Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado. She was one of the photographers who worked on the Mardi Gras book *The Night of Your Life* and documented the LGBTQI+ community over the years. After this her work shifted away from the documentary format to mixed media and installation. This gave her more scope to investigate ideas around identity, gender & sexuality and was inspired by artists such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Fiona Hall, and Bill Henson. Zanderigo has an exhibition history of 35 years that includes exhibitions at Stills Gallery and Roslyn Oxley 9, reviews in *Photofile*, *Art Monthly*, *Artlink* and *Art+Text*, work in collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Waverly Public Library and private collections and work published in books including *The Night of Your Life* and *Bicentennial Documentary Project*. Around the turn of the century, in her mid-career, Zanderigo moved away from Photomedia as it advanced into the digital era, to painting, preferring to work with the more tactile & visceral medium of mark-making provided by painting and drawing. She completed the “Painting Like The Masters” oil painting course with Charlie Sheard along with the “Australian Tonal Impressionism” course with Pablo Tapia.

Loudon Sainthill (1918–1969) was a costume and stage designer born in Hobart, Tasmania. Although Sainthill designed for the stage in Australia it wasn’t until he moved to England that his career flourished. Between 1932–33 he studied drawing and design at the Applied Art School, Working Men’s College in Melbourne, Australia. Around this time Sainthill made a living by painting murals in a surrealist style. During this period, he met his lifelong partner Harry Karl Tatlock Miller, a journalist and later an art critic and expert on paintings and antiques. Santhill’s growing interest in theatre and costume design was spurred by the Australian tours (1936–37 and 1938–39) of Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. An exhibition of his paintings of the dancers led to an invitation to return to London with the company. After the war, Sainthill and Miller lived at Merioola, Edgecliff with a group of painters who included Alec Murray, Jocelyn Rickards, Justin O'Brien and Donald Friend. Returning to England he would go on to design sets and costumes for Michael Benthall's 1951 production of *The Tempest* at Stratford-upon-Avon establishing him as a leading designer. Sainthill's work encompassed opera, notably Rimsky-Korsakov's *Le Coq d'Or* at Covent Garden in 1954, Shakespeare, pantomimes, musicals and revues, and although he became associated with a flamboyant and opulent fantastical style of design, he could also create an everyday reality, as demonstrated by his interiors for the film version of John Osborne's play, *Look Back in Anger*. His drawings and sketches are held in state collections around Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, as well as in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Luke Roberts (b. 1952) is an artist primarily known for performance, video, and photographic works. Since the late 1970s Roberts’ work has collapsed the personal and the political, blending themes of cosmology, religion, and science-fiction to reimagine how we engage with sexuality, spirituality, and human history. His ground-breaking performances under the alter-ego Alice Jitterbug were unlike any other artist working in Australia at the time. Working in an era when homosexuality in Queensland was illegal and persecuted under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Government, his work is a testament to the radical potential of a queer sensibility. Many of Roberts’ early works are situated in his rural upbringing and outback folklore, developing in later years into an interest in how we read and are seduced by history – which turns into future myths. Roberts’ most recent ongoing performance persona is her Divine Holiness Pope Alice, Ambassadress from Infinity and Manifestation of Extraterrestrial Consciousness. This mythical alter-ego character draws on Roberts’ ongoing interest in Roman Catholicism and other forms of religion and spiritualism with science fiction. Rather than embracing religion, his works imply an anti-clerical, kitsch, and occult attitude. Roberts’ oeuvre is idiosyncratic, with a multitude of mythologies built around the characters he has embodied, with the work or performance destabilising the local and cosmological with the past, present, and future. Roberts’ major survey *AlphaStation/Alphaville* in 2010–11 was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. In 2015, Pope Alice performed at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2019, Roberts was included in *The National 2019: New Australian Art* at Carriageworks, Sydney. In 2022, Roberts performed at Dark Mofo, Museum of New and Old Art, Tasmania, and was included in *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* at the National Gallery of Victoria International (NGV), Melbourne. Roberts work is held in many institutional collections in Australia including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; NGV, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Home of the Arts, Gold Coast (HOTA); Griffith University Art Collection, Brisbane; Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; Rockhampton Art Gallery, Rockhampton; and the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.