Self-Care for Aliens
March 22 @ 10:00 am – April 26 @ 4:00 pm
Self-Care for Aliens
Natasha Munro Hurn & Ezra Munro
22 March – 26 April 2025
DEPOT Artspace
28 Clarence St, Devonport
Exhibition Opening:
Saturday 22 March, 2-4pm
Image Credit: Southern Glitch, Polyester, clear printing ink, lipstick and eyeshadow, 2500mm x 1380mm, 2025. Image courtesy of Natasha Munro Hurn.
About the Exhibition
Self-Care for Aliens is a meeting ground between both artists expressing the relationship of the radical queer spirit finding a home in an organic vessel. To be trans for the artists is embracing mutations in the face of social alienation. At the forefront of the exhibition is cherishing this life practice that leads to fuller lives and shows different representations of queer subculture in Aotearoa.
The series involves a continuation of their shared practices of fantastical self-portraits made from digital collages. Now pushed into the physical space with various experimental screen prints utilising mostly makeup. Colourful fabrics are inked with eyeshadow, lipsticks and various tools that shape the self beyond harmful social traditions. They are interested in curating the fantastical with harsh reality, as that is how both artists find themselves in the day-to-day. The essence of the works is gleefully transforming through distortive creations and being purposefully excessive in that approach. The scale, material use and screen placements are finding beauty in chaos and practising safe yet liberatory queer release.
Underlying the series is a response to both Natasha and Ezra’s queer upbringing in Ōtepoti as the trans experience was confronted with open bigotry and general unease of being queer in public. Like as the project has unfolded though, violence can never demolish queer communities as we find kinship in the fullness of our social contortions. They hope to see the trans or even the alternative viewer in actualisation and find space within the messy crafts you see before you.
About the Artists
Natasha Munro Hurn
Natasha is an Ōtepoti / Tāmaki Makaurau based artist that usually explores utopian queer punk ideology through an experimental lens-based and install practice. She seeks to build representations of the self and queer communities in Aotearoa, developing fantastical documentation that is entwined with radical aligned hope. She has a core focus on safety away from violent heteronormativity through experiments of fabric patch installations and digital collages.
Ezra Munro
Ezra is an Ōtepoti-based artist who uses a mixture of technological and physical acts of distortion. Mutative photographs serve as a tool to showcase a blend of both photography and Photoshop to manipulate biotechnological pairings.
