MY POP LIFE

My Pop Life
2008-2026

My Pop Life began with an exhibition featuring an installation that recreated my teenage bedroom in nipaluna/Hobart in 2008, and most recently was presented as an exhibition of 96 digitally designed and hand printed posters and a collection of personal artefacts in Naarm/Melbourne. Between these milestones, My Pop Life has been exhibited in various forms in group exhibitions, as public art installations and as a Fine Arts (Honours) presentation at the University of Tasmania. After a years-long period of working on other creative projects, My Pop Life was revived after a life changing cancer diagnosis in 2020.

'After nearly dying from and then surviving cancer, I looked back at my life and creative work and saw that My Pop Life wasn't fully realised as a project. It became a way for me to reconcile some difficult moments in my past, gain a deeper sense of pride in my self and my identity and to engage in some meaningful truth-telling around trauma and survivorship for others to experience and hopefully learn and benefit from.'

This long-running project shares my experience of coming of age as a queer teenager in the late 1980s in Tasmania, where it was still illegal to be gay and punishable by 21 years in prison. This storytelling project presents a narrative that is framed by personal experiences and historical events including the gay law reform movement in Tasmania and the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. These pivotal events placed LGBTIQ+ issues at the forefront of local mainstream media and public debate and had an undeniable effect on my development and self-acceptance as a young queer person.

Using a remix methodology as a means for revisiting my past and referencing the work of queer artists who came before me - such as influential Australian artist David McDiarmid - My Pop Life explores the effects of these events on my emerging queerness and reveals how the colourful world of popular culture (including coded queer culture) offered a means of escape and validation. The result is a series of digitally produced posters and ephemera that reference pop and political posters, magazines and advertising of the era, as well as a collection of personal artefacts presented in a space that re-presents my teenage bedroom as a homemade museum. This contemporary art project seeks to blur the lines between private/public and reality/fantasy, to highlight the power of LGBTIQ+ history, culture and storytelling as affective tools to relate the experience of being a gay teenager and abuse survivor in Tasmania at a time when fear and shame seemed the only pathway to an uncertain future. Through this exhibition, I seek to create a safe space for exploring  a difficult past and celebrating 1980s queer culture in all its glory.

My Pop Life Media Release - Victorian Pride Centre exhibition 2026

My Pop Life  exhibition, Victorian Pride Centre, Melbourne 2024

My Pop Life solo exhibition, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne 2024

Michael Brady, My Pop Life installation, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, 2022