Drawn Together
I’m walking along Meanjin river on my way home from Easton Dunne’s artist talk and exhibition Drawn Together (2020), an impressive yet understated offering to queer visibility in their rural, central Queensland milieu.
The works on paper are intimate, everyday, and vividly rendered; a photo-realism that has left me hyper-aware of my surroundings: a statuesque water dragon regards me, a multi-tasking pedestrian strolls by, an electricity pole decorated with chewing gum. I’m a queer in the metropolis whose heart has been flung back into the bush.
In this body of work, Dunne effectively disrupts the prevailing assumption that queer people living in rural areas are necessarily “oppressed”. The figures are autobiographical and occasionally repeated across the room at slightly different scales such that — as someone unfamiliar with Dunne’s work — I don’t immediately recognise a ‘romantic couple’.
What I find most seductive is the way the human and non-human figures interact through gestures of mutual care. The most arresting gaze is, in fact, the side profile of a young calf licking (as though kissing) an out-stretched hand; strangely, the calf’s eye reminds me of the eye of the Spanish princess in Diego Velazquez’ painting, Las Meninas (1656).
The work invites us into a relaxed, contemplative mood as we wander around the gallery space in loops tracing its sweeping installation. I do a few laps because there is so much to take in; mark-making that resembles the texture of fur or fine hair, fluid transitions between images that dissolve and blur — not unlike the experience of being queer.
There is something slippery, too, in the way (un)familiarity and (mis)recognition register. I can see myself-as-metropolis in these images (a Maccas drive-through, a smart phone) but I know I am temporarily somewhere else. We become part of the blur.
Dunne is charmingly funny and simultaneously serious about the art and its disruptive intention, like when they point out their partner’s veganism was more controversial to their family than Dunne being queer. They carefully unpack terms like ‘metronormativity’, which equates the city with queer “liberation” and “progress” and rural life with “backwardness” (reductive stereotypes that eerily ring of colonialism and racism).
Instead, rural queer life is infinitely more nuanced and quite simply — Dunne’s exhibition indulges — downright lovely. I would say the work goes even further to evoke a sensorial desire, if not longing, for the rural queer life as a version of the Aristotelian ‘good life’.
It’s something I have noticed queers doing for a while, taking up the ‘country queer’ mantle. Alice Springs, Lismore, Castlemaine, the Blue Mountains. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have considered migrating myself. But it remains distinct from the idea of returning to one’s rural roots, as Dunne has done, living now near Rockhamptom (‘Rocky’) on unceded Darumbal Country.
There is a kind of ‘homecoming’ suggested. At one point they exclaim, “we are everywhere”, but confesses it requires local knowledge to recognise. Again, I’m reminded of the city, where queers are not always as ‘out’ or recognisable as you’d expect (take queer femme invisibility for instance). Dunne admits neither rural nor urban queer experience is a monolith.
The absence of ‘queer struggle’ from the work is understandable and yet unsettles me. I’m forced to confront a personal desire for the rural that I endlessly defer and at the same time a rural romanticism that I want to be swept up in. It contrasts to the sometimes abject reality of being a (quiet) queer in the (alienating) city.
The question then becomes, what exactly does the city presumably liberate queers from? The closet? It’s not that simple. I’m an ‘inviting in’ (as opposed to a ‘coming out’) kind of queer anyway. I’m generally not ‘out’ in the workplace, and even when I am I often self-censor as a way to expend less energy. Bigotry? This can be found anywhere. I surrendered my COVID puppy partly because inner-city dog parks are alarming spaces of unchecked privilege. Isolation? Urban queer communities are (rightly) not the utopia I had imagined and capitalist social relations are not easily transcended.
Later over coffee, I ask Dunne if the representation in Drawn Together is a ‘panacea’. But perhaps it is not a fair question, since an artwork cannot be everything all at once and (as Dunne emphasises) representation requires specificity. Such a question also makes the aesthetic assumption that the artwork only addresses what is made visible or visually apparent, whereas it may be in its omission (of negativity) that the work actually strikes a macabre chord.
Despite my curiosity for the non-ideal dimensions of queer life, I am reminded that the purpose of the exhibition is to redress a representational imbalance. Drawn Together achieves this with a friendly commitment to accessibility via realism, since “it has to be to communicate the story”. Maybe my personal grappling is, after all, evidence of the work’s aesthetic ‘slipperiness’, its ability to both affirm and unsettle, to both seduce and disrupt.
You can follow the artist @easton_artist
You can follow the author @clare.ocall
This article was written on the unceded lands of the Jaggera and Turrbal peoples.
