SIDNEY MCMAHON
’SIXTY NINE’
26 JUNE – 15 AUGUST, 2025
Thursday 26 June: Exhibition Launch
Thursday 31 July, 7 & 14 August: Echoes - Student Sound Program
Wednesday 13 August: In Conversation with Sidney McMahon
Friday 15 August: Slow Looking Workshop
Sidney McMahon, Sixty nine, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sixty nine is an immersive sculptural exploration of the symbolic and emotional terrain of the number 69 as a cycle of life, death, queerness, and intimacy. Anchored in the architecture of the home, the work navigates domestic spaces as sites of eroticism, grief, and repetition.
Through video work and layered sculptural forms, the exhibition evokes the five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - as nonlinear, looping states.
Tender, raw, and unsettling, it considers how care and rupture coexist, how desire and mourning blur, and how queer intimacy reclaims space within familiar cycles of loss, pleasure, and transformation.
ARTIST BIO
Sidney McMahon is an interdisciplinary artist whose installations, videos, and performances delve into the entanglements of desire, technology, and queer embodiment. Shaped by lived experience, their work navigates porous boundaries between self and other, drawing on personal narratives to explore broader themes of intimacy and transformation. Often unfolding through relational, affective, and narrative-based processes, McMahon’s practice interrogates systems of power and care, while holding space for tenderness, absurdity, and rage.
McMahon holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Southern Queensland (2009), a BFA (Hons, 2010) and MFA (2015) from Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, and a Master of Art Curatorship (USYD, 2011). They have exhibited nationally and internationally in solo, group, and curatorial projects including at ACCA (VIC), ACE Open (SA), Outer Space (QLD), Raygun (QLD), Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (NSW), Auto Italia (LDN), Clearview Ltd (LDN), and Open Source Gallery (NY).
Sound design and electronics by Annie McKinnon
Exhibition text by Sarah Rodigari