Hail Holy Queen | Easton Dunne

Onespace invites you to hear current exhibiting artist, Easton Dunne in conversation with artist and curator Keemon Williams, as they unpack Easton’s installation, Hail Holy Queen. 

When: November 8th, 5:30pm - 7:30pm 
Where: Onespace, 25A Bouquet Street, South Brisbane Q 4101 

Easton Dunne’s Hail Holy Queen (2023) applies a queer lens to a childhood time and place where, according to the artist, they “held an acute sense of [their] own queerness and transness but had no language or agency to recognise or express this identity, in part as a result of the conservative influence of religious beliefs on family and community”.

The installation simulates aspects of Dunne’s paternal grandparents’ house, located on a cattle property on Ghungalu Country. It was a location for many family gatherings, often after Sunday church services, in which the artist and their family would say the Rosary together before watching television and sharing meals. 

Keemon Williams

Keemon Williams (b. 1999) is a queer interdisciplinary Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist and curator of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes a diverse range of mediums and performative elements to interrogate the relationships between location, personal histories and the manifestation of culture in a postcolonial world. 

His practice seeks to critically examine facets of his identity and its intrinsic tethering to the wider context of being “Australian.” Responding to realms of space and time, cultural production and psuedo-ethnic representations, Keemon views culture as an alloy, to be forged and adapted to find belonging within and beyond the self. 

He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) from QUT, where he received the Hilde Chenhall Memorial Scholarship for Visual Art, and was selected for the 2020 edition of Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Keemon is also a founding member of ANTHEM ARI, an independent group dedicated to the celebration of BIPOC voices in the arts.