Spring 1883 : Winter is coming but Spring is Queer

13 - 16 August 2025 

MARS is delighted to present, Winter is coming, but Spring is Queer for the Spring 1883 Art Fair, 2025 at the Windsor Hotel. Featuring an array of emerging to mid-career artists, including Atong Atem, Archer Davies, Brenton Drechsler, Brodie Kokkinos, Emil Cañita, Giles Alexander, Hannah, Brontë, Jenna Lee, Nadege Philippe-Janon, Juan Rodriguez Sandoval, Kasia Töns, Kyle Archie Knight, Nicholas Mullaly, Phong Chi Lai, Tim Van, Tricky Walsh and Scotty So. 

 

Bringing together these artists through installation, video, sculpture, textile, photography and painting, Winter is coming, but Spring is Queer reflects the many identities, ideologies and practices of contemporary Queer lens. 

 

There will be performances during the fair by Scotty So as well as Jenna Lee, with a Card Game and more, as the space evolves over the days of Spring. 

 

Catalogue essay by Jake Treacy. Curated by Ruby Vaggelas. 

 

 

 

PORNO/INFERNO

For Dioniso, for Proserpina, for Lucifero—we offer flowers drenched in sweat and salvation, blooming from the velvet creases of this hotel suite.

 

As cold clenches fields and sky, MARS brings fire, lapping flames at door and hearth, to dawn and crown tomorrow. In the gloam of night, artists check in as guests—in the guise of queer angels, sly devils, Muscle Marys, slicked dreamers, drenched lovers.

 

See here in this suite: So’s effigy, passed out and strewn across bed, like a wrecked bouquet from

Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowersi; from the bed, Davies’ paintings gallop like dreams as wild things run fastii; Atem thrones seat with faces of postcolonial portals; whilst Cañita cucks chair, conjuring lovers in ritual and dormant dark. Brontë’s spellwork invokes feminist ancestors through salt, shells and magick corners; Mullaly manifests melancholic play and edges nocturnal scenes of pleasure; and Knight’s photos cruise and bruise like blushing fruits between the sheets.

 

Each work blossoms like a cum-slick pomegranate split under heel in the underworld as memory

smoulders in the seams of the garden’s mattress. Here, winter tongues the edge of night—but Spring slips in, rimming the horizon, bringing the heat.

 

Delirious and liminal, Walsh’s work drips, warmed with celestial saliva onto the window’s mouth.

The coming dawn is a revolution swaddled in leather and coated in Vaseline; the revolution is my

boyfriendiii shining brighter than the sun through the keyhole of the hotel door.

 

Meanwhile, Kokkinos’ imagery haunts in slippery, seductive flesh, like ghosts across a foggy

bathroom mirror; Lee’s paper hums and glows with ancestral song by the nightstand, guiding us

bright with embers past, present and future. Lai, Töns and Van quilt and weave through the fabrics of time and place, stitched with the potency of symbols and craft; whilst Alexander, Drechsler and Rodriguez Sandoval push through soil and urban turmoil to unearth mysteries and truths of the civic.

 

We see desire blooming chthonic and uncontrollable—wet, furious, and gorgeous. And we’re all

invited to lipstick our names across the mirror.

 

As much porno as it is inferno, we are all hell-raisers. We are rooted deep—in the hotel room, in the dark. Spring is coming, and so are we.

— Jake Adam Treacy

 

i Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943, paperback, France. Published Allen & Unwin, 2019, Australia.ii Archer Davies, Wild things run fast, 2024, oil on linen. Exhibition Theft, MARS Gallery 2024, Australia.iii Bruce LaBruce, The Raspberry Reich, 2004, film. Distributed Picadillo Pictures Germany.