It’s hard to be sad there’s no Mardi Gras Fair Day this year when Mardi Gras past jumps off the walls in C. Moore Hardy: Life in Black, White & Pink. This exhibition, opened by Professor Nareen Young, highlights the intersectionality of queers and Indigenous peoples “living at the margins”, and celebrates all the spaces we make community together. Opening night was wall-to-wall queer documentarians with William Yang, Mazz Image and Jamie James (The Party) all in attendance. And if the moments captured on the walls didn’t bring to life community, we could each draw comfort from our fellow art consumers and take the time to connect. My moment of connection came when I bumped into former Triple J reporter Jo Chichester, who yanked up her pant leg to show me the muffler burn she got when we rode with the Newcastle Vixens as part of Dykes on Bikes. She’d jumped off on the wrong side of my motorbike to do a live-to-air broadcast at Taylor Square. The year was 1997. Yeah, I’m old.
This photographic exhibition invites you to ponder what it means to walk on this land. Land that has been called The Golden Mile, inhabited by our queer elders including those who were incarcerated in 1978. This makes the National Art School’s former gaol setting very fitting. But don’t stop there; think also about the Indigenous elders of the Gadigal people who used Oxford Street as a track (muru) to the bays of the southern headland before it was cleared by convicts. Along with this dispossession (which queer people increasingly face through gentrification) Indigenous peoples still experience disproportionate incarceration. Staring at C. Moore Hardy’s photos of our peoples side-by-side really invites you to consider carefully the threads that bind.
The C. Moore Hardy: Life in Black, White & Pink exhibition is open until 9 March 2024.