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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.

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.

Bashir Baraki (b.1943–1998) was an artist known for photographic works that combined themes of gay male sexuality, his Lebanese heritage, and catholicism. Like many of his contemporaries, Baraki produced sexually explicit work during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, but since his passing from cancer in 1998 has often been forgotten by much of art history. Baraki's images frequently appropriate iconographic religious imagery, read through and altered by his contemporary political position. Baraki's photographs often evoke a sense of carnality and eroticism formally putting his work in contrast to many of his Australian contemporaries. Baraki juxtaposes human and historical experiences, which are brought together with a particular sense of unease, recalling painterly influences such as Francis Bacon and Francisco Goya. Baraki was of Lebanese descent and was born to first-generation immigrants in Greenville, North Carolina, United States of America. Between 1948–52 Baraki and his family returned to Lebanon where he was educated. Between 1960–62 Baraki studied at the Petersburg School of Fine Art in Petersburg, Virginia before transferring to The Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia where he studied Fine Art (painting) from 1962–63. In 1966 Baraki settled in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he lived and practiced for the next decade. In 1977 Baraki moved to Melbourne, Victoria where he would remain until his death. Throughout his career, Baraki was included in numerous group and solo exhibitions. He exhibited work at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; amongst many others. Baraki's work is included in various public and private collections in Australia and New Zealand.

Peter Tully (1947–1992) was an artist, jeweller, costume designer, and gay community activist based in Sydney, Australia. As the inaugural artistic director (1982–86) of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Tully made a significant contribution to Australian gay cultural expression and Sydney’s nightlife in the 1980s and '90s. Tully met fellow artist David McDiarmid in 1973. The two were lovers for two years and remained friends and collaborated on numerous projects until Tully's untimely death in 1992. His fashion output has been recognised in exhibitions such as *Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson: Flamingo Park and Bush Couture* (1985) at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A Tully Australiana-themed necklace was featured on an Australian postage stamp in 1988. His iconic *New Age Business Suit* appeared in *Australian Fashion: The Contemporary Art* (1989–90), held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and in Tokyo and Seoul. Collaborating with Ron Smith, he applied his skills in the design and fabrication of large-scale popular visual structures to the floats and costumes for ‘Expo ’88’ in Brisbane, and conceived installations for the traveling Australian Bicentenary Exhibition. A retrospective exhibition, *Peter Tully: Urban Tribalwear and Beyond*, was mounted at the National Gallery of Australia in 1991. His last exhibition was the June 1992 presentation of Australian artists at the Société de la Propriété Artistique et des Dessins et Modèles gallery, Paris. Tully's works are held in various museums and collections around Australia. Tully died of AIDS-related illness in Paris in 1992, at the age of 45.

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”.

David McDiarmid (1952–1995) was a leading gay activist and artist who worked in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. As an early gay liberation activist, he wrote for and illustrated the *Sydney Gay Liberation* newsletter and *Gay Liberation Papers*. His first gallery exhibition in Sydney in 1976 focused on gay male identity and sexual liberation themes. McDiarmid’s creative output encompasses art, design, craft, fashion and music. It also sits at the intersection of activism, art, and community art, with gay rights and identity politics being the primary focus in his contemporary art and graphic design. He moved to New York in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1987. Reflecting on his own work in 1992 he said: “I wanted to express myself and I wanted to respond to what was going on and I wanted to reach a gay male audience. I wanted to express very complex emotions and I didn’t know how to do it . . . I was in a bit of a dilemma. I thought, well, how can I get across these complex messages. I didn’t think it was simply a matter of saying gay is good.” McDiarmid designed posters for Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride and Leather parties, safe sex and World AIDS Day campaigns and he was artistic director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. He was diagnosed HIV positive in New York 1986 and from his return to Australia in 1987 his work was concerned with HIV/AIDS experience and politics. His famed *Safe Sex* and *Safe Injecting* posters of 1992 designed for the AIDS Council of NSW were an international sensation after they were shown at the 1993 international AIDS conference in Berlin. The *Rainbow Aphorisms*, a series of digital works created between 1993 until shortly before McDiarmid's death of AIDS-related conditions in 1995, is a key example of his political savvy and wit, combining gay and queer activism with tongue-in-cheek statements, pointed truths, and messages of hope. His work has been widely collected by institutions and in 2017–18 his *Rainbow Aphorisms* featured throughout the London Underground transport network as part of the ongoing *Art on the Underground* program, a presentation initiated by London's Studio Voltaire and the David McDiarmid estate. In 2014, McDiarmid was the subject of the major survey exhibition *David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me* at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work continues to be shown internationally.

Mathew Jones (b. 1961) is an Australian-born contemporary artist who also took British citizenship during a 20-year sojourn in the UK. Jones completed a BA at the Victorian College of the Arts, a MA at London Metropolitan University, and a PhD at Monash University. Since the late 1980s his work has dealt with the double-edged complexities of gay identity and queer theory. He has held over 20 solo exhibitions in Australia, New York and Canada and been included in over 45 group exhibitions throughout all Australian states and in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, São Paulo, Caracas, Copenhagen, New York and London. A survey of his photographic work from 1989 to 1994 was held at Monash Art Gallery in 2016. He was artist-in-residence at PS1 Museum, New York 1995/6, and the Acme Studio in London in 2001. He received an Australia Council Fellowship in 2003. His earliest work such as *Silence = Death* (200 Gertrude St, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; and Institute of Modern Art Brisbane throughout 1991) embraced notions of silence and refusal as political strategies in ways that pre-empt the interests of many younger queer artists today. *I Feel Like Chicken Tonight* (Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Canberra Contemporary Artspace, Canberra, and Artspace, Sydney throughout 1995) highlighted the expulsion of NAMBLA from ILGA during the mainstreaming of gay politics, whilst *Poof!* (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1993 and 1995) exploded the idea of a stable gay identity and *The New York Daily News …* pined for a time before Stonewall. Other projects of note include *A Place I’ve Never Seen* (Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Optica, Montreal; and Ace Art, Winnipeg), and, *Mathew Jones & Simon Starling* (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2002), and several public art projects. If his work of the 1990s critiqued gay identity politics he is more likely now to bemoan the hegemony of queer politics and recent works look backwards at creative ways we can forge gay links with artists of the past.

Hiram To (杜子卿) (1964-2017) was an artist who worked in conceptual-based installations. He was also a writer in the visual arts, popular culture, film and fashion. Born in Hong Kong to Chinese parents, Hiram To lived in Scotland and Australia. He has widely exhibited in Australian public galleries and internationally, with works acquired by institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, Powerhouse Museum and the Queensland Art Gallery. Hiram was invited by London’s Camden Arts Centre to exhibit a one-person exhibition in 1994. The invitation was the first Chinese artist solo show at a British contemporary art museum. The Winnipeg Art Gallery, the State Gallery of Manitoba in Canada also presented a selected projects survey of the artist in 2002. He was one of three artists representing Hong Kong at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. As a curator, he has collaborated with Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Artspace Sydney, Ipswich Regional Art Gallery and Next Wave Festival in Australia, and Hong Kong’s Goethe-Institut. Since 1995, he resided in Hong Kong and worked in communications and journalism. His writings have appeared in South China Morning Post, Harpers Bazaar Hong Kong, C for Culture, City Magazine, The Standard and many other English and Chinese language publications. Hiram To’s work tackles the nature of changing identity and its relationships with the mass media and personal / public interface. Taking reference from a wide variety of sources such as literature, film, art and popular culture, he creates multi-layered installations that embrace and challenge the way that identity is constructed or fragmented. http://www.randian-online.com/np_news/hiram-to1964-2017-dont-let-me-be-misunderstood/

Brent Harris (b. 1956) is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, widely recognised as both a painter and printmaker. Born in Te Papaioea Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand, Harris moved to Melbourne in 1981 and began his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) the subsequent year. Throughout much of his career, Harris has explored the psychoanalytically-charged space between abstraction and figuration. Consistent with this has been his fascination with the subconscious and dream states. Harris’ compositions at times pulse with libidinal energies, though the drives and memories they draw from are often disquieting. Harris’ exploration of this terrain is guided by his close study of artists and art history; as well as reflections on his personal and familial histories. At times this has extended to responses to current events which have had a distinct impact on Harris’ life and those around him, such as in 'The Stations' (1989) series. Through hard edge geometric abstract forms, this group of fourteen paintings and corresponding series of aquatints describes Harris’ reflection on the impacts of the HIV/AIDS crisis via the biblical narrative of Jesus Christ’s journey through judgement to death. Harris’ also draws particular inspiration from his dedicated studio practice, where he privileges chance, intuition and experimentation as sources for creative insight. Across a career of nearly four decades, Harris’ art has been the subject of a number of major solo exhibitions including Just a Feeling: Brent Harris Selected works 1987–2005, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, curated by Bala Starr; and Swamp Op, Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Robert Cook (both 2006). In 2012 a significant monographic exhibition opened at the NGV International, Naarm Melbourne, curated by Jane Devery (2012). Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki presented in 2023 Harris’ first major solo survey exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand, The Other Side, also curated by Devery. Later that year, Harris’ first retrospective Surrender & Catch, curated by Maria Zagala, premiered at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, and in 2024 the exhibition toured in an expanded form to the Art Gallery of South Australia.