Travel Between Thresholds

Beastliness witnesses horizonless, post-species-specific possibilities, as we tango into the far-fetched future, propelled by unchecked hungers. Human physicality is entirely transformed by the technologies of everyday life. Miraculous conceptions are ordinary, death is deferred, biology is no longer destiny. Gender imperatives mate, proliferate and mutate. Beastliness invokes prancing, preening, coupling metaphor, sutured with history, folklore, mythos, queered archetype. Insult tangled with endearment acquires infinite appetite. Beastliness synthesises traditional handmade photomontage with digital animation into a dalliance with predatory, reckless sirens. Boxset Hey Hetero! is a public art collaboration between artist Deborah Kelly and photographer Tina Fiveash. The project’s six pieces have been seen in illuminated public advertising spaces, city billboards, magazines, books, newspapers, bus ads, postcards, galleries, and online. Hey Hetero! has appeared in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, New Delhi and Wellington since 2001, when it won the major award of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. It headlined the Glasgay festival, Glasgow, in 2006, and in 2011 appeared on 1,500 posters around Claremont, California. In 2013 it will be seen in advertising spaces across Skopje, in Macedonian. Hey Hetero! returns the gaze at heterosexuality: the privileged sexuality which makes gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movements both possible and necessary. In the form of simulated mainstream advertisements, the work invites heterosexuality into public discourse. Note: No heterosexuals were harmed in the creation of this artwork.