Unbecoming

21 May to  10 Aug 2025

Artists: James Barth, Neve Curnow, Alicia Frankovich, Matthew Harris, Yvette James, Callum McGrath and Keemon Williams
Guest curated by Tim Riley Walsh

Unbecoming examines the ‘queer gothic’, characterising it through dark, horror-tinged imagery and themes; states of collapse and decomposition; and a focus on isolation and the individual. These themes are posed as counter-narratives to more dominant and typical framings of queerness through emergence, togetherness and communality.

Unbecoming is a group exhibition of new and recent works presented across La Trobe Art Institute. The exhibition argues for the importance of new subcultural positions within queerness in an era in which the queer movement is threatened by its subsumption within popular culture. The exhibition considers how these subcultures’ derivations are generative, creating an antagonistic resistance to queerness’ increasingly monolithic status.

Unbecoming considers regional communities as particularly fertile spaces for subcultures to develop, featuring the work of a number of artists with ties to regional communities. The exhibition considers how difference is accentuated outside of population hubs, and how the position of being ‘away from the centre’ is felt both spatially and culturally.

The exhibition illustrates a fuller, more nuanced image of contemporary queer life. Ultimately, Unbecoming argues for the importance of antagonism to queerness and subcultures as a form of generative resistance to the threatening, undead creep of the mainstream. It conflates Judith Butler’s description of queerness as a ‘site of collective contestation’ with Chantal Mouffe’s belief that difference and disagreement is vital to sustain a legitimate body politic. To ensure queerness’ vitality, then, we must continue to contest it, redeploy it, reconsider its frameworks, resist the norm, and challenge the complacencies that reduce its potency.

Image: James Barth, Heap, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.