The Huxleys:
Double Happiness
Greeting friends and strangers at their Places of Worship (2021) exhibition with a disco hustle and a velvet-gloved embrace, performance art duo The Huxleys offer VAULT a tantalising glimpse into their multidisciplinary practice. Will and Garrett Huxley reflect candidly on why the comingling of performance, music, costume and photography is the ultimate form of artistic escapism, and the survival mechanism that has helped them overcome personal and professional inhibitions.
Image credit: The Huxleys, Vulnicura, 2021, Giclée print, 75 x 106 cm. Photo: The Huxleys. Courtesy the artists and Murray White Room
A horde of masked Melburnians queue up outside the Centre for Contemporary Photography. It’s early July, and the air is thick with the dread of another looming lockdown. Is there anything in the entire city that can turn this diorama of deep frowns upside down? I take it you’ve met The Huxleys before, Sunshine?
The Melbourne-based performance art duo’s latest body of work, Places of Worship (2021), is a chaotic cataclysm of unapologetic queerness framed through a surrealist lens that jolts the gaze into spheres of existence. Nervous Wreck and Stalac-Fright are two of 15 compositions in which Will and Garrett Huxley – artists and life partners – appear clad in a disco-fizz of handmade costumes, posing against backdrops of natural Australian landscapes. True to The Huxleys’ oeuvre, the series fuses outlandish disguise, styling and staging techniques with personal narratives running far deeper than what appears at first glance. Aptly described as ‘escapist wizardry’, the photographic works are better than any caffeine hit, whisking one away from the dourness of pandemic existence into a technicolour phantasma where all of life’s woes melt away into a golden taffeta waterfall.
Inside the gallery, a cautious crowd parts as Will and Garrett emerge in a flamingo-pink flurry. They are part artists-in-the-flesh, part ethereal spectres shimmering in their own joyous sphere of existence that nobody, nothing, can quite penetrate. Pandemic what? Sensing today’s audience might need an extra shot of somethin’-somethin’, they dazzle the optics with sequin-encrusted ...Subscribe to read this article in full
