Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, 1 – 30 June 2024

The Closet brings together ten LGBTQI+ artists whose practices celebrate the richness and diversity of voices and experiences within the Queer community, particularly those whose formative years were spent in regional or remote Australia.

The artists included in the exhibition span cultures, generations and geographical locations. Their works are critical, triumphant, political and deeply personal. Within each one runs an activist thread of resistance, resilience and pride, and a search for connection across the gaps in our understanding of each other. 

The exhibition takes its title from a work in the Bundaberg Regional Galleries Collection by eminent photographer William Yang, which hangs in the first room. Over the image Yang has written a memory of his early years, the last line of which states: “I really don’t want to go back there. The Closet.”

By trusting audiences with their stories, these artists hope to make visible the often brutal histories and legacies carried by the queer community, the breadth of Queer presentations that exist, and the multitude of ways LGBTQI+ people learn to survive and thrive despite historical and contemporary attempts to erase our existence. 

In the words of NYC based activists QueerNation, whose outrage was inspired an escalation of anti-gay violence and prejudice in the media throughout the 1990s: 

“We’re here. We’re Queer. Get used to it.”

Exhibiting artists: James Barth, Troy-Anthony Baylis, Jorge M. Brito, Courtney Coombs, Easton Dunne, James Gleeson, Aaron Hoffman, Patrick Lester, Peter Waples-Crowe, William Yang.

Curator: Carrie McCarthy