Perhaps the photographic shows, reviewed here last week by Robert McFarlane, monopolised all the spice. There's a tendency, anyway, to associate the feistier forms of gay and lesbian art with photography and photo-media. These two-handers fall short in the controversy stakes, but they take up the slack in artistic values. True, if they represent the acceptable face of gay art in Australia in the 21st century, a pallid riposte to the shenanigans of a Fry or a McDiarmid, then the gay constituency has something to worry about. But if they stand or fall on their merits as exhibitions, not as instances of exhibitionism, then comfort can be taken in the sheer classiness of the crafted objects on show and we can all get on with the business of looking at art for its own sake.
Horn is a sculptor whose medium combines metals and glass.
His current works resemble props for a choreographic Cinderella in the prissy but precisely calculated manner of Sir Frederick Ashton. In keeping with this, they function best at a distance and would probably benefit from more theatrical lighting. Itchy Scratchy is the odd one out, since the massive silver crab that it depicts in bravura fashion does not derive from the Cinderella myth unless it alludes to a condition of the crotch experienced by an ugly sister. Horn is capable of such an interpolation. Buemi, in contrast, is an artist for understatement.