SIDNEY MCMAHON
’SIXTY-NINE’
26 JUNE – 15 AUGUST, 2025
Thursday 26 June: Exhibition Launch
Thursday 31 July, 7 & 14 August: Echoes - Student Sound Program
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.
EXHIBITION TEXT
work once finished is like a tombstone
Sarah Rodigari
she died and the world broke
you destroyed the home around you
now you have to build a new house
assemble every stereotype fill it with clichés
create another desperate domestic situation
I envy the dead
I spent my days waiting for death
watching you sleep wake and say that you can’t sleep
your bones a little less dense
your limbs a little thinner
people kept asking
is she dead yet
I’ve tried to grieve to move through something
I wanted a logic needed a parameter
twelve maybe eighteen months
numbers bond and become facts
sixty-nine is a double-up
a relationship breakdown and a mother dying
I felt synergy between us
a shift in dynamic
one minute we’re building a house together
and then we break up
and then the next day we’re like oh hi
I’ve never experienced a connection like that before
on her death bed she raises her finger
I wait
curls her sweet thin Elvis lip
watch her toothless mouth
shush she lisps
death makes us stingy
I cannot get enough of your raspy smoker’s voice
I feel the hairs go up on the back of my neck
I remember that you never tried to find a compromise
I have been immersed in K
I can’t stand life right now without being a little high
I take the good with the bad otherwise I’m a hypocrite
why so much drama
because I am overwhelmed with anger
why so much anger
because I am overwhelmed by grief
I have escaped
into a circle
afternoon sun
faded furniture
embers of a dying fire
a fruit tingle
cordial
a change of season
a change in time
warm fade
a hard facade for something soft
some desert sand
grey hair died by red henna
nicotine teeth
stained sheets
padlock
and chain
variations of angles
orange blue light
streaking to middle grey
the colour is real
This text is informed by conversations with artist Sidney McMahon and was written for their exhibition 69.
During the process of writing, I reference Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) and Grief Lessons Four Plays by Euripides (2006), Victoria Chang’s Obit (2020), Ghislaine Leung Bosses (2023).
The title, work once finished is like a tombstone is taken from Moyra Davey’s, conversation with Sharon Hayes in Les Goddesses (2016).
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