Backdirt

Backdirt examines queerness beyond marketable representations, presenting figurative works by Priscilla Rose Howe and Daniel John Corbett Sanders that register joy, excess, discomfort, pain, sadness and anger. Howe's large-scale drawing depicts an imagined queer future—a sauna scene of ease, pleasure and possibility where figures eat, drink and inhabit their bodies freely alongside other creatures. Sanders' loosely piled plasterboard shards with watercolour paintings function as a personal archive, documenting family anecdotes, childhood memories, dreams, queer history and experiences of growing up in conservative 1990s New Zealand. His work references Aotearoa's queer history, including the 1986 Homosexual Law Reform Bill. Together, Howe and Sanders resist the co-option of queer identity by neoliberal interests, asserting multiplicity, self-identity and complexity within a public queer imaginary. Their works refuse singular identities, instead inhabiting a queer world that is abundant, untameable and infinitely various.