MYSTERY SOLVED is a large-scale installation of photography, sculpture, and video that forms a tangled network of imagery, with shifting sightlines and a playful visual vocabulary. Through collage and abstraction, the exhibition explores public gaze, the limiting narratives in media representation, and the architecture and infrastructure that shapes our movement.

 

This work draws upon an ongoing engagement with historical materials held within the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA) that reference trans and gender diverse lives. Recently, I have been drawn to newspaper clippings from the 1960s to the 1980s, predominantly from Murdoch‑owned publications. In these articles our bodies are objectified, scrutinised, and questioned inappropriately by cisgender people. Themes of fraudulence, secrecy, and truth are seen throughout. These historical themes are familiar as anti-trans rhetoric resurfaces periodically and cyclically, platformed to distract and divide. Despite the obvious stifling of our bodies, desires, and relationships, resistance can be seen in the community-created archival material that documents activism, everyday life and connection. 

 

The gallery is tightly packed with performative roadblocks and trip hazards. The image formations reference airport runways, rock fall nets, archways, vents, and gates. These architectural and infrastructural forms hold back, constrain, and enforce order, shaping how we move through spaces. The exhibition playfully re-works these forms that can feel opaque and permanent into a bodily, porous, and chaotic weave. 

 

Repetition, layering, and movement mirrors the conditions of media circulation itself, where images are continually reframed and recontextualised. The material references in the exhibition convey slipperiness and grit, as well as consumption and construction. Imagery of fish scales, tarps, tide lines, and bore stained metal are collaged throughout the space. Colour is heightened—nauseating, acidic, and synthetic.

 

The collection of images is assembled through a dyslexic logic, a slippery grammar in which images are guided by texture, sensation, and sticky, sweaty feelings. While informed by the visual language of historical media held in AQuA, text references are loose and malleable. Dyslexia, like queerness, keeps words, images, and ideas moving, shapeshifting, and always up for questioning.

 

Illegibility can be fraught, but it can also be a strategy to refuse resolution. Developed for Passage’s 24/7 glass frontage, the installation turns to the conditions of its display. The glass operates simultaneously as frame and barrier, shaping what can be seen while holding something back.

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- Jack Ball