Meet the sweeties behind Love Letters to the Horizon💟

Love Letters to the Horizon at Kudos Offsite; Backspace Gallery

9-30 June, 2022

Featuring Ava Lacoon-Robinson, Joshua di Mattina-Beven, Kaylee Rankin, Kieran Butler (Love Club), Laura Luciana, Leilani Talula Knight, Lev Kaya, Lingam Brown, Rattus Bedlington, Risako Katsumata, Samuel Luke Beatty, and Ziggy Grana.9th - 30th June 2022SCASS Backspace, Level 3 Wentworth building, USYD, Darlington. Stolen Gadigal Land.

Curated by Ava Lacoon-Robinson and Joshua di Mattina-Beven

Photos by Kieran Butler

Instagram: @avalacoon and @joshdibe



Queerness comes with a sense of impossibility to become who you want. We know how it feels to be a theory. To lead imaginary lives. And so, what this community needs is a bit of practical magic. Pop-up exhibition Love Letters to the Horizon from Kudos Gallery platforms 13 LGBTQ+ artists to make the utopia of queerness a reality. From embroidered silk self-portraits of gay sex draping religiously from the ceiling (alongside floating cloud pillows!) to shockingly candid documentaries about touching your friends, and in the centre: a love letter writing station—each installation becomes its own healing antidote. And together, in SCASS’s Backspace, they give a breath of fresh air to the storylines of queer becoming.

Ava Lacoon-Robinson and Joshua di Mattina-Beven are the sweeties behind this fully queer-led wonderland. Despite being new to the scene of curation, they reach for the stars with ease and wisdom. Both are undertaking double degrees in Fine Arts and Theatre so they have their hands in many disciplines. Ava has a flair for film photography and dabbles in creative direction for fashion events—Josh adores performance art. But I’d bet what grants them success across the board is their 6th sense for people, identity, and relationships. In Love Letters to the Horizon, the textured atmosphere hugs you immediately like a friend. This is no small feat!

To be honest, I was in awe during our interview. Ava and Josh are so blessed at holding space with style—like true Earth signs! No wonder their exhibition feels safe in its intimacy...akin to walking around someone’s bedroom. One of many things that wowed me about their curatorial journey was how they found the silver lining in all the pandemic-related changes to their exhibition. In particular, its relocation to the Wentworth building of USYD which is essentially a bridge-like shopping mall...

Josh: We were kind of in a thoroughfare and we laughed because it was small, it was a bit dead, then there was [Love Letters]—this bright almost fishbowl utopian world that people were incidentally stumbling upon.

Ava: We originally pitched for quite a different space [pre-lockdown] but this ended up being such a good location at Wentworth because it was a juxtaposition to the rest of the building like you had the medical centre, you had the optometrist...

Josh: Stock photos of nuclear white families.

Ava: And it was interesting because the passers by....you could see them look into our exhibition and see quite explicit positions of beautiful, loving, gay sex and you could kinda see people inquisitive but also shocked...They seemed quite confused as to why our exhibition was there. We did have a lot of people enter in but definitely a lot that just looked from the outside in.

Josh: Which is almost so fine, if that’s where you’re at and the fact that we could facilitate that as well was special, yeah.

Ava: It’s the idea that queer depictions of love. having them in these random moments, and in areas that seem surprising, fulfils that mission of, well, queerness is everywhere. It should be in this random mall-esque building!

Emily: It’s like Love Letters as a whole becomes an analogy of queerness in heteronormative society. Cause there was a sense that the exhibition was straying from the civilising rituals of municipal buildings, like art galleries, where there’s almost this performance of viewing art. You can’t see in from the outside, you’re kinda just going in or whatever, hoping to resonate with something queer.

Josh: You have to find it in the rubble.

Ava: You do your research, you write your lists of the things you want to see, you don’t tend to stumble across it. You have to put in an active effort as a queer person.

Josh: And stumble across an abundance? That word kept coming up for us. This was a group show with such idiosyncratic experiences and reflections all coming together. And I think abundance speaks to perhaps its overwhelming nature, in that it can be quite emotional and we knew it would be for some people, so balancing that with a curatorial vision of gentleness and safety and comfort was really important.

Emily: Why was 2022 the year for Love Letters to the Horizon?

Ava: Well when we originally pitched it, which was during the second lockdown, so that was when Kudos originally opened its proposals, I think it was definitely a response to the first lockdown... That desire for queer connection...Coming back on campus and really wanting to bridge connections between the queer community cause it can be quite disparate...We wanted to have an exhibition that would bring people together with interaction. 

Josh: Whilst preserving a sense of diversity of experience. Like I think what the concept allowed was [for] each letter to be so unique and distinct in kind of a constellation with each other rather than one whole: ‘This is queer’.

Ava: So many people during lockdown realised in themselves different elements of their queerness and I watched that in a lot of people around me. And to be inside and realising all those things and then not really having an outlet to necessarily discuss that...[so] we wanted a space where people could feel that glimpse of community but also to sit quietly, write a letter, contemplate. Even just seeing a poster or seeing little glimpses can bring so much to someone. They don’t necessarily have to engage with the whole exhibition and the experience of it.

Emily: All the works really felt like part of a family. How did you finesse that as curators?

Ava: It was just this longing and desire that was so gentle from everyone to depict queerness in such a beautiful way. I think it all connects because they are all genuinely love letters and they all have such a vulnerability in them. It’s this kindness that they inherently give each other because they’re all about queerness so it makes sense that they all work together in a space.

Josh: It was so gratifying to have it materialise after it being in our heads for a year. Ava: We actually managed to keep all of our original artists, which I was pretty impressed by, because we returned back to them a year later [post-Covid].

Emily: It’s cool that you took this time of isolation to grow Love Club—an online interactive archive of love letters that you and Josh co-curated with Kieran Butler. How did this project inform Love Letters to the Horizon?

Ava: Love Club is a part of ArtMail which is a program that Kieran ran with Arc curative and Kudos. So you’d subscribe for free and every week you’d be a mailed a new piece of art. We designed our own envelopes and each wrote our own letters [to our past or future selves] and sent them within the envelope. Then we gave people instructions and their own coloured paper in which they could write their own letter and upload it. It’s still super active.

Josh: So that was more literal love letters. But [in our exhibition], there’s this sense of exploring past the written word—and also creating a physical space for love letter writing. 

Emily: Historically, letters have been a mode of secret communication for the gays. In your exhibition, this history is embraced out in the open and in so many variations beyond the written word. Why was this sense of futurity important to capture? 

Ava: It's this idea that everyone has their own timelines especially in queer existence. We all experience things at a different rate compared to heteronormative timelines... In creating community and trying to send love to people, someone might capture that and it’ll mean something to them. That was the idea with the chain up to the ceiling with the love letters writing table...It's like attaching your letter and having it sent up to the horizon; injecting it into the atmosphere.

Josh: It’s an act, an action in a space, and it becomes by virtue of the representative structure, part of the process of making and building and continualness. It’s still ongoing and letters are still going to be written.

Ava: We always talked about the exhibition not necessarily ending on the date that it closed but [it] marking the beginning of the journey, so it expands beyond that room. And that was always our intention when we did the love letters during lockdown with Love Club. This is something you can hold onto. This doesn’t have a time constraint to it. It's something we want to grow, and have its own time—which is what the exhibition was about.

Emily: There’s something about writing where you feel like part of a story rather than an onlooker of that story. Making this happen in a space, and as part of an ongoing archive, is pretty special. You would think it would be a bit confronting to sit and write a letter to yourself but I didn’t hesitate. It was actually the first thing that drew me in because I didn’t feel unsafe. Not only as a queer person but as a person in public.

Ava: Which I was happy about because apart from kids graffitiing in the back room...

Josh: AHHH!

Ava: I think they were just teenagers being teenagers.

Josh: What were some of the quotes?

Ava: Just like “I’m gay” and “I <3sucking dick”.

Josh: And there was a smelly penis or something.

Ava: They’re complex ideas as well, even the idea of queerness—they might not understand that terminology. I think that was their way of trying to interact with it. Cause I don’t know how I would’ve felt if I’d seen an exhibition like that when I was younger.

Josh: It was a serendipitous invitation of like this adolescent rebelliousness which lended itself to the exhibition.

Ava: It was like its own little artwork.

Emily: As queer officer for UNSW's SRC in 2021, you represented the portfolio of students at the university, ran the queer collective on main campus, organised events, and did a lot of advocacy. How were your nerves in terms of this being an entirely queer led project?

Ava: There was no incidence of hate crimes or being made to feel uncomfortable. There was security in the building! I've had lots of experiences when I was queer officer of people doing a lot of homophobic things towards the clubs and towards events like so many. But I didn’t witness any of our posters being ripped down. We didn’t have anyone come in and say anything disrespectful in any way. 

It was all done really well. I did have a bit of anxiety about that because it was, as we said, this kinda fishbowl in an unsuspecting environment, which in itself I shouldn’t necessarily be super surprised that nothing bad happened, and it shouldn’t give me this warm feeling that nothing bad happened, but that is still the reality, you know.

Josh: And something that you actually need to be worrying about when you’re platforming queer artists. Representation is great but without that safety, well then what are you doing? That’s always a risk.

Ava: Even on opening night for an exhibition like ours, you’d assume that at least 60% of the audience would be queer identifying [because] we’re publicising an explicitly all queer run event and show. For a lot of people [that] is an easy target.

Josh: You saying queer run reminded me of this moment at bump in where I realised ‘I’ve only worked with queer people today’... I think I noticed the feeling first...like having a queer operated space actually created something I didn’t expect.

Ava: Yeah every single person that touched the exhibition, from Kudos to Arc and everyone, are queer identifying as well. And I’ve worked on projects before that are all queer run but every time I do it, it is so special because usually as a queer person, whether you realise it or not, you’re looking for these little easter eggs in your environment like ‘Oh is that person queer?'—not even from a romantic stand point just to feel that sense of safety. But here, everyone is queer. It’s the default, which is so rare.

Emily: You don’t realise how much you’re not reaching for until you find people who see you and launch you towards it.

Josh: You’re holding your breath in this little bit and you don’t even realise.

Ava: Everyone is also just trying to do their best, especially when tackling queerness. Like although [Love Letters to the Horizon] was a celebration of beauty, we also have that tumultuous nature of having our own triggers and trauma when it comes to our queerness because of the society we live in. And so it’s important to have that true care for people. 

Emily: Is this your first time curating?

Ava: This is our first exhibition... and I feel like it was a really nice thing. I didn’t feel afterwards that anything was done wrong or incorrectly like even little mistakes and what not. It was just really exciting to create a space for the queer community; having a part in that. And it not necessary being 'Josh and Ava’s exhibition' like this intensity centring us as the curators. 

We disappeared a bit more into the background [and] forefronted the artists and all the people interacting with the exhibition because this is about facilitating rather than leading. 

Josh: I felt so grateful and emotional to receive and be able to platform what the artists were capable of and I think it was overwhelming to be a conduit for that at times, both emotionally and logistically. 

Emily: On my visit to Love Letters I met Kaylee who was gallery minding and she mentioned how much they gained, personally and professionally, through the process of shooting their films because there was no pressure from either of you like it was very much an exploration. As you say, you didn’t enforce this set structure.

Josh: Yeah we had a meeting with Rory Moy who was our theorist—he wrote an essay for our exhibition. And I remember Rory saying that curation is defined by care and an exhibitions success is determined by the care and empathy that curators foster and it’s about the artists and caring for them. Having that as a marker of success was really helpful.

Ava: The examples of curatorship that I’ve seen that are smaller or more experimental spaces in Sydney and across Australia...people don’t really emphasise [care] like it isn’t talked about enough. So I was ready headfirst to do that for artists. To check in on them, to have these meetings, to support them in all these ways. But no one really tells you that this is something that is expected of you. 

Josh: It's this vision, this theoretical framework.

Ava: I feel like in a lot of exhibitions not many people know their curators—it’s this distant figure. There wouldn’t have been an exhibition if we didn’t have that relationship with our artists.

Josh: It was nice to see them making friends with each other during install.

Ava: Yeah it was lovely seeing them connect and forge a little community. That was really sweet? I know colour came into it in a big way.

Josh: And in a surprising way too... We were with them, just helping them fulfil their visions. We didn’t want to have too much input on their direction—we had little to none in what the final works would be. But then receiving them in the space, there were through lines and echoes between them.

Ava: We wanted to create triads of compositions and conversations across the gallery space where works would talk to each other and complement each other. We focused on making sure everyone had a space that they could breath and exist in without competing with each other. And I feel like we didn’t have any works that were limited in any way. Everyone had the same equivalence. You couldn’t tell going into the gallery which artists had more followers or who was more 'successful' or what not. It was our intention for it all to be presented in a very balanced manner... They were all the same love letter equivalence.

Emily: Did you learn any juicy things about yourselves throughout this journey? 

Ava: I think it gave me greater *gratisfaction*...which was really exciting because you think ‘I wanna go into curatorship and creative direction’ then you have that little worry that once you do it, what if you don’t like it.

Josh: On this sense of queer becoming... I’m a recent high school leaver [and] for queer people, high school can be a difficult time...generally they are not conducive to the queer becoming. I think maybe it’s more allowed at university. And so, for me [entering the university sphere] came at the perfect time like this is a beginning and it’s a time for reflection and non-linear messy becomings.

Ava: Embracing the messy.

Emily: What would you say in a letter to your past self ?

Ava: I don’t know if she would be shocked where we are now...but I’d want to tell them that being sapphic and being queer isn’t a gross thing, it’s not something to be anxious of. And beyond that, vulnerability isn’t a scary thing and there is this life ahead that is going to bring so much joy and happiness even though that seems like such a romanticised vision. And although every day is up and down, little bounces, there are these glimpses of utopia.

Josh: I think I’d be a bit awkward. Uhhhh Josh would be looking at me like “So WhO aRe yOu?”. I think as little Josh operates in straight spaces, like again that thing of telling them that queer is all around you and you don’t even know it. Making friends with people, you don’t know what that connection is called just yet but I can say now that it's a queer connection.

Emily: And what would your future self say in a letter to you now?

Josh: I’m at a place now where it’s like I’ve just exited or had a time where it’s about naming like ‘Gee this is what it is.’ And I think older Josh would push out of that and have this re-explosion on the other side where it’s a similar unknowing—and I hope that this continues. 

Ava: I constantly think about my future self with such excitement from doing these reflections of talking to my younger self. And thinking about like holy shit where am I going to be in 40 years and what is that going to feel like. Because even though I’m out and I identity as queer and I do queer projects and other people looking at me would probably think I’m quite formed in who I am, there’s so much I don’t know and that I’m grappling with and trying to piece into my surroundings. I’m justexcited to be able to grow even more. Like I hope she’s really out there.

Emily: That reminds me. Who were your inspirations for this exhibition?

Josh: I think the queer friendships that I’ve made, the people that I’ve met, on a more familial basis, have informed my path so much. The people in the younger years I spoke to in high school have had such a huge influence on letting me know, so close to me, how queer lineage and queer friendship are going to impact your immediate community, and I think that is something that I’ve taken into uni and tried to proliferate.

Ava: Cruising Utopia by Jose Esteban Munoz... It was such an important book for me. I have it annotated three times over on my bedside table... One of the tutors here showed me [his work] and this is the first time that I actually interrogated queerness and I looked at it through a decolonial lens. It’s this idea of, you know, an ideology that goes against these really strict patriarchal and different ideas like queerness isn’t just a sexuality. There are things in society that are really fucked up...

Josh: And he goes into the role of aesthetics in kind of creating little utopias...

Ava: Yeah it’s about queerness as this horizon.

Emily: So did this inspire the name of your exhibition?

Ava: Definitely... The horizon is the unknown. We may never know what the horizon looks like, we may never know what queerness is but every day we pursue that, and we try and form what it is and we embrace that unknowingness. We don’t have to define queerness or put it in a box because that’s not what it is. It would do it a disservice. 

“We are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality...The future is queerness's domain”

-José Esteban Munoz