“For more than a decade, Davies has been creating a serial parade of photographic images that sit within an Australian context of queer art and visual culture. Obvious reference points include artistic icons of yesteryear like Leigh Bowery right through to artists of the present such as Liam Benson and Justin Shoulder. What makes Davies kin to these few isolated examples is how he draws from fashion, popular culture, advertising, and club culture. Where he differs is how his practice has seamlessly blended references to the local and global through the sites depicted, steeped as they are in the alienation of the built environment with all its vernacular recognisability and visual excess. Davies’ body of work is like a typology of locations – real and imagined – that references and constructs hyperstylised tourist destinations and more generic landscapes, streets, and beaches you might find in a web image stock library. Whatever the location, Davies is drawing attention to the ubiquitous role photography plays in relation to place. What makes this site more of a selfie magnet than any other? is what his work asks. Location location location, is its reply.”
– Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Glisten, February 2024.
Gerwyn Davies, Gunshot, 2023, archival pigment print, ed. of 5 + 1AP. © the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney. Courtesy the artist, Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney and SECCA (South East Centre for Contemporary Art)
Read the exhibition essay by Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham here.
SECCA (South East Centre for Contemporary Art)
9 February to 3 April 2024
New South Wales
