Queer Heirlooms - Queer Love Collective and Unassigned Gallery
Courtesy of @snapsbysimz
One of three annual fundraising shows, Queer Heirlooms at Unassigned Gallery is also their third annual collaborative exhibition with Queer Love Collective. This year, featuring 100 artists on the dot, the exhibition explores memory and heritage, looking at what meaning we make and how we pass it on. The exhibition spans about every art form you can imagine – including the written word and medieval weapons made out of fabric – contains multitudes in how expansively “heirloom” was interpreted. The more I explored the exhibition, both on opening night and on a more relaxed weekday return, the grouping of works by loose theme seemed to pop out. There were explorations of kink, of queer labelling, sexual exploration, online worlds, fandom, and queer history among many others. In an open call exhibition, the breadth of work and skill is bound to vary, but three categories - photography, fibre arts, and the proliferation of renaissance adjacent imagery - stood out above the crowd.
The photographers (and photography adjacent works) on display, specifically: Tuesday Wilson, Olive Bly, Mya Middleton, Kyle Archie Knight, and Archie Smith focus on softness. Each work is a tender moment – an embrace (Wilson), a portrait (Smith and Knight), a ray of light (Middleton), a pursuit of aid (Bly). Each of them feels like a door into a larger world, but work well tethering a bright, sometimes chaotic, expansive show into these small moments. Meditating on the works, I wondered what the heirloom being passed on was. For Bly, it's a helping hand, reaching out to help a pigeon who needs it, passing on the care to a nature in need. Wilson’s work is one I see every day I’m at work, and even on the smaller scale on display at Unassigned, the warmth of the embrace they’ve captured exudes out of the image. Middleton’s beam of light passes on the peace in the small moments, the noticing. Everyone’s heirloom is their connection to one another, each of these photographers makes that abundantly clear.
I met up with Madi Sherburn (of Queer Love) at the opening, and as we were walking around I wondered out loud about the number of Renaissance (specifically early 2000s, Ella Enchanted-esque) works on display. Sherburn pointed out not only the ongoing online love for weird animals in paintings, but also that there was Melbourne’s first ever renfaire not too long ago, and that fantasy escapism has always been incredibly queercoded. There will always be trends in art, and this seems to be this year’s theme. It Girl Hag’s soft swords/fem armoury is on display, not to be sold, but to be wielded. The three works expand what fibre arts can be, and the play between the colour and texture and the brutal nature of weapons is incredibly apt for the show. These heirlooms, still to be wielded, are to be played with, to be enjoyed, rather than to defend. Weapons only in name. Passenger Princess by Em Veale may as well be an image coming home from the renfaire. Two princesses, party hats still on, the one in green allowing sleeping beauty a peaceful rest. Down in the corner, next to the armour, it reminded me of Audrey Eberhard’s Green Dinosaur, a party hat as a crown, a dinosaur for a dragon. Eberhard’s artist statement, highlighting her friend handing around small dinosaurs, gives a physical form to an heirloom, the painting bringing the love of a friendship group (and plastic miniatures) into a painterly tradition.
On Binding, a work by Amy Fabry-Jenkins and Austin Fabry-Jenkins bridges the fantasy element and the fibre arts. The embroidered binder reads like armour, telling a knight’s story of the battles they have won and lost. Nearby is Luche Collective’s Take Me With You, bringing the collective’s own cultural heirlooms (traditional Andean Weaving) into the conversation. The work is in two parts, a larger quilt-like structure and a bag. Heirlooms are what we carry with us, this makes that point abundantly clear. The weight of the famous AIDS Memorial Quilt is also felt. Pissed? Stoned? Horny? Where’s your quilt? addresses that weight head on. Fi Waters places themselves in that queer artistic tradition, not waiting for a eulogical moment to tell their story. In many ways, the quilt is the queer heirloom. To see so many fibre arts being made and practices renewed shows a resilience, a reclaiming of textiles as a living heirloom.
Queer Heirlooms is an exhibition with heart. It is overwhelming and spans the far reaches of form, proprietary, skill, and execution. Not all art is created equal: it was an open call exhibition, falling into all of the highs and lows that brings along. The highs - the photography, the fibre arts – are more than worth a trip to Brunswick, and seeking them out in the exhibition is more than worth your time. (Take a minute and pick up one of Niamh White’s zines too.) The turnout alone tells you about the place that Unassigned holds within the Melbourne art community. Unassigned has an open door for everyone, equal opportunity and the chance for art to be seen and support the place Unassigned holds as its own living heirloom for queer life in Melbourne.
Queer Heirlooms is on at Unassigned Gallery until June 29.