JC (WA)

JC’s practice embraces sculpture, installation, performance and new media works to investigate contemporary conceptions of gender, sexuality, desire and embodied identity.

They focus on building resilience across queer generations in an increasingly precarious world. During their six-month Hyper Local residency, JC’s project presences queer histories in public space in Perth using augmented reality (AR) technologies. Drawing on the Gay and Lesbian Archive of WA and oral histories of their elders and peers, they will develop virtual sculptures (including avatars) placed around select locations in Perth that are significant to its queer community.

JC completed an Honours degree in contemporary arts in 2010, and has developed an interdisciplinary practice that spans socially engaged practice, visual arts, live/performance art, and emerging and experimental practices. Their creative practice is concerned with investigating contemporary conceptions around gender, sexuality, desire and embodied identity, and building resilience in an increasingly precarious world. Over the last 37 years, as an out queer person involved in activism, they have witnessed, through queer cultural practices such as Pride parades, trajectories of change that they could not have imagined being possible when they were 19 and first coming out. Their abiding concern now, as we enter a period of dramatic social and environmental change, is that all that good work undertaken by queer elders/ancestors/peers is at risk of coming undone. They feel a responsibility to younger generations to provide them with nurture, hope and resilience. As an emerging queer elder, they feel a sense of responsibility to open up productive conversations about how we can navigate this unanticipated world. They are building pathways to this with the work they are doing in their queer community, and through their creative practice.