J Davies: Evolving

Evolving

Photographs are housed within a constellation of pre-loved frames gathered from friends, whānau, op shops, and roadside discoveries. Ornate, sentimental, kitsch, elegant, and occasionally absurd, they arrive carrying their own histories. Together they create an installation that feels less like a gallery and more like a home.

Drawing on Maori understandings of time, the exhibition is informed by the takarangi spiral, a symbol of return, growth, and continual becoming. At the rear of the exhibition, a dense salon-style altar-like installation accumulates like a living whānau archive. Echoing the photographs of tīpuna displayed within homes and wharenui, it gathers lovers, friends, chosen family, ancestors, and shared memories into a collective portrait of belonging.

Too often, queer and trans people are recognised only in absence. We are memorialised after loss, offered flowers when they reach our graves. EVOLVING asks what it means to celebrate one another while we are still here. To witness ourselves in all our complexity: intimacy, sex, friendship, glamour, awkwardness, resilience, and love.

Many of the works utilise existing exhibition prints from the artist's archive, embracing reuse as both an environmental and social gesture. Recycling becomes storytelling. Sustainability becomes community care.

Grounded in accessibility, the exhibition resists the exclusivity often attached to contemporary art. Queer and trans and indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by economic precarity, and by working with existing materials, second-hand objects, and accumulated histories, the exhibition values accessibility, resourcefulness, and connection over exclusivity. It celebrates communities that have always known how to make something beautiful from whatever is available.

To evolve is not to leave the past behind. It is to carry it forward differently. In this sense, evolution is not biological destiny but a communal act of becoming.

We are not anomalies within the system.

We are what comes after it.

Review

Grounded in a generosity of spirit, J Davies photography creates space for Queer lives to be seen. Complex, tender and strong. In Evolving, J Davies offers intimate portraits of community, revealing the powerful ways people hold one another, build kinship and make room.

At the heart of this work is a commitment to dismantling systemic shame. Images move gently between intimacy and observation, foregrounding forms of connection that dominant culture has overlooked, misunderstood, marginalised and inflicted harmed upon. What unfolds within this archive of presence is a vision, one that embraces and celebrates resistance.

There is a quiet radicalness to this work were Queer intimacy acts as a revolution. These photographs imagine a world beyond bodily binaries, systems that profit from self-hate, exclusion and exploitative consumerism. J Davies offers glimpses of another way of being, one shaped by care, self-determination and an inner freedom. Through these photographs we are given the privilege to look inside, reflect and understand the courage it takes to build spaces where people can live as themselves. Trust moves through these photographs.

Quietly. In this way, Evolving becomes more than an exhibition or a voyeuristic insight. It is an invitation to witness a community reshaping the world around it with beauty, courage and love.
- Tony Albert

Evolving , J Davies
5 August - 5 September 2026
Opening event: 5th August, 6-8pm