Adult By Nature

Ty Locke, Bashar Ali, Matilda Sutton, Pink Suits, Lo Lo No, Studio Lenca, Wayne Lucas

05/08/22 - 14/08/22

Adult by nature sits in the paradox of queer childhood, inescapbale from an adult lens, a lens of imposition, reconciliation and affirmation. The inherently adult world of queerness is created by the historical criminalization and patholigising of queer sexuality that severed its perceived existence (in a wilful ignorance) from childhood. This oppression of queerness creates an orientation of displacement, surrealism and otherness for queer children, a disavowing of authenticity in a world that is adult by nature, revealed as unobtainable, whilst omnipresent and deemed perverse if crossed before threshold of puberty and young adulthood. The journey of queer childhood is an intrapsychic space, an exploration beyond closed doors, a risk taken on desire. A reliance on adults for acceptance if found out or declared. The undeniable effect of this othering and bendy perceptiveness of queer artists lived experience is processed through art making (subconciously or with intent) where adultness impacted their childishness; and as adults the pitfalls and wormholes of those experiences are raked, healed, embraced and transformed. Most childhoods are lucky enough to be navigated through the site of a home, a collection of rooms or spaces, with different functions, governed and formed by adults. A home is a duplicitous space to perceptions bent by systems of displacement; A kitchen full of weapons, a toilet full of screams and gargles and bedrooms where babies are made or nightmares are repeated. Doors left open or locked out of bounds. Adult By Nature invites artists to investigate this phenomena and create rooms in Quench Gallery. Site specific, mixed media, audio visual and performance work will create the exhibition that manifests through abstraction; a memory, an object, an absurdity, an anecdote, a trigger, a telling of a home.