Talk and Screening: Dr Sally Gray on David McDiarmid

Sydney–based writer and curator Dr Gray, from the Estate of David McDiarmid, will discuss the importance and legacy of Australian artist David McDiarmid’s prolific and expansive practice, including his Rainbow Aphorisms series. McDiarmid (born 1952 Hobart, Tasmania. Died 1995 Sydney, Australia) was an artist, designer and activist, recognised for his prominent and sustained artistic engagement in issues relating to queer identity and history.

Rainbow Aphorisms are a series of printed multiples, produced from 1993 until the artist’s death in 1995 of AIDS–related illnesses. McDiarmid produced these works in response to his own, and his community’s, experience of the AIDS crisis, and the multiple forms of devastations it manifests – political, emotional, intellectual and medical.

For our inaugural public realm project, Studio Voltaire presents McDiarmid’s Rainbow Aphorisms as a series of public works shown intermittently across sites in Clapham and Brixton, in parternship with Art on The Underground and This is Clapham. Over the course of a year, artworks will appear at various locations including the façade of Studio Voltaire, neighbouring LGBTQ+ venue Two Brewers, Brixton Underground station and other temporary locations.

Dr Gray will discuss the importance and legacy of this series of works, as well as the artist’s wider practice. Involved with the Sydney Gay Liberation movement since 1972, his first solo exhibition Secret Love, held at Sydney’s Hogarth Galleries in 1976, featured collages explicitly exploring gay male sexuality, anti–gay legislation and public and private sexual hypocrisies. McDiarmid is also known for his artistic direction of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

The talk will also include a screening of A Short History of Facial Hair (Hermano Silva, 2011) – an illustrated essay that McDiarmid presented at the AIDS political forum HIV: Towards a Paradigm, in Melbourne in April 1993, in which he pulled together his personal fashion, grooming and adornment story, representing a 20–year period of his political and sexual history. Beautiful, hard-hitting and humorous, A Short History of Facial Hair is an interrogation of the artist’s appearance as it changes from hippie, to clone, to gay liberation activist, sexual revolutionary, hustler, dancefloor diva and, ultimately, to HIV positive queer subject – his self–styled ‘Toxic Queen’. McDiarmid traces how gay politics changed during what he described as ‘an extraordinary time of redefinition and deconstruction of our identities from camp to gay to queer’. The work explores links between art, identity, politics, dress and adornment.

This event is free but due to limited capacity, booking is recommended.