Hymn is a collaborative exhibition by Andrew Nicholls and Sion Prior, two queer-identifying, Perth-based artists raised within fervently Christian contexts.

Nicholls was raised a strict Catholic, was an alter server, sang in his church choir, lead prayer gatherings during school recess, was read the Bible nightly, made to recite the rosary daily on his way to school, and received a personal blessing from Pope John Paul II.

Prior was raised an evangelical Christian, and as a teenager was entangled in cult-like offshoots of the Charismatic movement. He is a five-time recipient of the Christian Endeavour Award from his high school, and helped found a church and ministry at eighteen.

Both artists’ emergent queer sexuality and broadening intellectual inquiry during their late teenage years triggered a break from the religion/s they had been committed to, a spiritual and ideological shift that continues to inform their life and work. Hymn was conceived to allow both artists to explore and pay tribute to the very different Christian aesthetics they have been strongly influenced by, while referencing the homoeroticism implicit to Christianity, with its sole male deity.

Andrew Nicholls is an Australian-British artist, writer and curator whose practice explores how power has been expressed through aesthetics, historically. He is interested in tracing the historical recurrence of particular aesthetic motifs, and with exploring periods of cultural transition during which Western civilization’s stoic aspirations were undone by base desires, fears or compulsions. Nicholls has undertaken residencies and exhibited work across Australia, in China, England, Italy, Southeast Asia, and the United States, and undertaken commissions for institutions including Artbank, Brookfield Multiplex, the City of Perth, Curtin University, and Duke University Press. His work is represented in collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the City of Perth, and the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings, and is familiar to Perth audiences via his ceiling mural at the City of Perth Library, and his recent solo exhibition, Hyperkulturemia, at The Art Gallery of Western Australia.

 

Sion Prior is an emerging Australian artist and writer. His multimedia practice primarily consists of photography, video and poetry. For several years both Sion’s written and visual practices have been driven by a humorous, transcendent and confronting exploration of masculinity, sexuality, religion and mysticism. It is through art that Sion tries to extract from his circumstances and experiences all that is comic, magic and poetic, and to induce in his audience a striking, elaborate sense of otherworldliness.