ANDREW NICHOLLS

In his third solo exhibition with .M Contemporary acclaimed Western Australian artist Andrew Nicholls descends into the queer underworld in Dis, a body of work spanning a decade of research into the links between contemporary gay identity and Greco-Roman mythology, and the millennia-old association of queer subjectivity with violence, heartbreak and death.

From the foundations of our contemporary understandings of queerness in the Early Modern period, the Classical world was romanticised by gay men as a pinnacle of tolerance and acceptance. Historical figures such as Hadrian and Antinous represented the idealised trope of ‘Greek love’ between an older man and an adolescent boy, celebrated by figures such as Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde and Victorian-era photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose fetishised portraits of Sicilian youths can feel uncomfortably predatory to contemporary eyes. Alongside this oversimplified and somewhat problematic understanding of an ancient cultural paradigm, Classical mythology is replete with narratives of same-sex rape, violence and death, spawning a trope of queer tragedy and doomed gay love under the Italian sun which continues to the modern era in novels and films such as Death in Venice and Call Me by Your Name.

Nicholls’ drawings, photographs and ceramics explore this strange confluence of associations alongside depictions of underworld deities whose nuanced and complex identities perhaps represent a ‘queerer’ salve to more simplistic historical tropes. As well as a (somewhat camp) slang abbreviation of ‘disrespect’, the exhibition title is the name of the Roman underworld, and its chief deity, Dis Pater who was later conflated with Pluto, the God of mineral and agricultural riches.