Cairns Pride Exhibition 2026
Cairns Pride Exhibition 2026: Surface Tension explores how encounters with others shape us, the impressions we leave behind, and the ways relationships change through experience and time. Responding to Cairns Pride’s theme of Reflections, the exhibition continues a longstanding celebration of queer creative practice.
Surface Tension
10–31 October 2026
Tank 4, Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns
Curated by Andrew Wolfson
View the official exhibition listing at Tanks Arts Centre
The Dinner Party
Click the image to enlarge.
Jon Riethmuller, The Dinner Party, 2012–2026.
Curator’s Choice Award, Surface Tension, 2026
The Dinner Party began as a staged photographic tableau made around 2012. I occupy the central position, seated between two men: the man to my right, who has since died, and his husband, seated opposite in black. What began as an exploration of relationships and the emotional tensions of a shared domestic space has, through time, become a meditation on memory, presence and absence.
I returned to the image in 2026, reworking it through techniques and understandings developed through my subsequent artistic practice and research. Beneath the composed surface of the domestic tableau lie less visible tensions: intimacy and distance, connection and separation, memory and loss.
The photograph now exists between two moments—the instant when three people sat together before the camera and the present from which that moment is remembered. Its surface preserves their presence while time has irrevocably changed what that presence means.
Curator’s Choice Award
Remarks by Andrew Wolfson at the Pride Exhibition Awards Ceremony, 10 October 2026.
“So, the final award is the Curator’s Choice Award.
And, as curator, I spend a lot of time looking at the artwork, obviously, thinking about how they speak to one another, trying to understand what each artist is bringing into the room, and kind of how they connect and speak with each other as well.
But this work stayed with me for many reasons that might not necessarily be immediate, but I think the piece speaks to that as well.
And the visual presence of this work just draws you in.
And the longer you spend with it, the more it kind of reveals.
And that’s part of the reason I love art.
Sometimes you respond to something before you’ve quite worked out why you might like it or what it means.
So I’m very pleased to present this year’s Curator’s Choice Award to Jon Riethmuller.”
— Andrew Wolfson, curator, Surface Tension
Excerpt transcribed from the supplied audio recording.
Minor punctuation added for readability.
With thanks to curator Andrew Wolfson for including The Dinner Party in Surface Tension and recognising the work with the Curator’s Choice Award.