The Huxleys Worship The Queer Icons Lost To HIV/AIDS In Bloodlines
Image: Image: Supplied
Bloodlines is an act of worship and a sparkling séance for the queer artists lost to HIV/AIDS.
Through costume, photography, video and performance, Will and Garrett Huxley celebrate voices silenced during the epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. They also acknowledge how easily their story might have been different. “We understand that we are fortunate as gay men, fortunate to still be here today and making our art,” they say. “If we had been born a decade or so before, our story may have been a very different one.”
Growing up as isolated queer children in the outer suburbs of Perth and the Gold Coast, both found escape through creativity. “It was art that saved us,” they explain. “Gave us things to dream of. Other worlds vastly different from our surrounds.” Queer heroes glimpsed in magazines, books, Rage, Countdown and rare gallery visits kept their hopes alive.
“These artistic voices were our beacons,” The Huxleys say. Seeing those heroes disappear while understanding their own sexuality was devastating. Bloodlines returns them to dazzling life, interpreting each artist’s influence through silhouettes, handmade costumes, androgynous glamour and unapologetic excess.
Originally curated by Jacob Boehme, the exhibition recalls the creative and sexual freedom following gay liberation, when queer people could “love, make love and live without fear”. The Huxleys want to revive that spirit: “We wanted to bring back that joy, that freedom, that pure celebration of queer and gay love.”
The works were imagined as queer holy cards. “We are not religious in the sense, but these queer artists are our saints,” they say. “They are our religion and they deserved to be worshipped.”
Bloodlines shares this lineage with generations while recognising the debt queer artists owe those who came before. “They fuelled us, fed us and set us free,” The Huxleys say. “We stand on the shoulders of these giants and we carry their torch.”
21 October–8 November
Fairfax Studio and Main Foyer, Brisbane Powerhouse
melt.org.au
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