Sean Coyle: Cruising Wonderland
February 14 - April 2, 2017
Photography Gallery
Sean Coyle, Piranha Park (2016)
Cruising Wonderland is a body of work concerned with articulating new queer perspectives. It invites the converted and unconverted to cruise at leisure through an installation of staged photography and diorama which focuses on sites of homophobic violence in New Zealand and Australia.
Between 1906 and 1911 in Tamarama Sydney there existed the largest open-air amusement park in the southern hemisphere – Wonderland City. The site of this failed colonial endeavour had previously been known as The Pleasure Gardens. From the mid twentieth century the area became a popular ‘beat’ (a site for men cruising for sex). During the 1980’s this area became a site for an epidemic of homophobic violence with gangs of youths entertaining themselves through the blood sport of ‘poofter bashing’. During this period a number of men were thrown from the surrounding cliffs to their deaths.
“This exhibition cruises an imaginative landscape for powerful little truths. It is an investigative, queer reading of faded and buried historical homophobic horror. A horror that persists today. It also sheds light on idiosyncratic queer perspectives. The various elements in this Wonderland waver between the inferred codified and signified, between light and dark and the subjective grey area of success and failure.
There might be something for everyone here.
Cruising Wonderland is immersive and reflective by virtue of the content and the nature of the works themselves. The tyranny of the black void, a primal fear, the theatre of the doomed spectacle, the void for which to be subjugated, or paradoxically, an opportunity for which to emerge and be validated. This tension between commemoration and celebration of aesthetic and conceptual content is the driving mechanism and impetus of the exhibition. (…)
The exhibition invites the viewer into an inherently dark Wonderland, but also invites the viewer to participate in conceptual and visual play. Play which includes the device of still life, a nod to dead queer artists, to the subverting of religious device, glitter blood, the playing with dolls and figurines.”
- Grant Hall, 2017
This exhibition is presented as part of Pride Festival 2017.
