February 2025 Curator Queer Contemporary: Chaosophy at the National Art School Building 25 Project Space.
Queer Contemporary: Chaosophy brings together three generations of queer artists (including recent National Art School graduates) who make and break language across the intersections of art, activism, poetry and performance. Through their individual aesthetics and distinct voices, together the artists disrupt histories, conventional silences and cultural forms.
Many thanks to the artists: Kika Kereru Baker, Daniel Browning, Sam Chan, Blake Griffiths, Frankie L.A, nikita lelu, r e a, Victoria Spence, Jake Starr, Ali Tahayori, Magic Young and Justine Youssef and special guests Tania Bowra and the Swamp Daisies.
Thanks to the NAS Gallery team Katrina Cashman, Lucy Latella and Ashton Biddulph, to Head Librarian Lea Simpson, Print Lab star Amanda Woollard, the queer contemporary working group and Luke Thurgate.
Extra special thanks to Nadeena Dixon for wonderful Welcome to Country. And to r e a for the special edition of GARI (language) 2024-25 which claims such a profound place on this site of carceral and colonial violence and asks us to think deeply about Country, language and the body.
February 2024 Lead Curator Qtopia Sydney (former) Darlinghurst Police Station, 301 Forbes Street Darlinghurst, Sydney. The largest queer museum in the world! My thanks to the curatorial team whose dedication, diligence, research, vision, thoughtfulness, and creativity have made this a complex, beautiful, and multilayered work of history and culture: Bertie Blackman, Andrew Burrell, Laura Castagnini, Samuel Chan, Aunty Nadeena Dixon, Bren Donnellan, Todd Fuller, Ben Graetz, Steven Ross, George Savoulis, Jeremy Smith, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Amber Vincent, Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria, and Yiorgos Zafiriou.
Two pair; there is no away 2022 plaster and mild steel shortlisted for the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize September 27 – November 5 2023 at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.
Lavender Menace 2022, included in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2023, March 31 – June 10 National Art School Gallery; touring regional galleries until July 2025.
February 17 – March 18 Curator, WARD 17 SOUTH for Qtopia Sydney, National Art School Forbes and Burton Streets Darlinghurst
This exhibition evokes the Ward 17 South of the 1980s and 1990s. It is shaped by the lived experience of those who remember the first days and years of the AIDS crisis, and how the community mobilised in the life and death circumstances of HIV. In this solemn space you will hear the voices of long-term survivors, doctors and nurses, advocates and activists. It includes interviews, and images of day-to-day life and special occasions on the Ward, alongside objects from the St Vincent’s Hospital Collection.
February 13 – March 3 Curator, A thousand beautiful things Clifford Chance Arcus Pride Program 2023, with work by Ali Tahayori, Armando Chant, Justine Youssef, Christine Dean, Blake Griffiths, Nadia Odlum, Neil Jenkins and Kurt Banks.
February 2022 I am very pleased to be curating the next Queer Contemporaries exhibition at the National Art School: I want a future that lives up to my past.
Curated to coincide with the 2022 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, this exhibition brings together a range of distinct LGBTQI voices from within the NAS community, including teaching staff and alumni. It presents works in dialogue about the nature of contemporary art and politics and possible personal, local and global futures through queer visual languages and points of view. I want a future that lives up to my pastjuxtaposes artists and works to make visible queer aesthetics that are not tied to obvious representations of identity and sexuality, but are materially grounded in the ways LGBTQI lived experience and creative practice demands a range of navigations and interventions in mainstream cultural forms and interpretations. Against the global backdrop of the climate crisis, our second pandemic, and the last decade’s conservative backlash against the human rights of those of us who live in the margins, the works included offer subtle and complex articulations of ideas, images and forms that bridge difficult pasts and possible futures.
This exhibition is part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2022.
LizBradshaw 