Zac Segbedzi: Collectables, Sex is Gay (Part Deux), The Show About the Show

• Cameron Hurst

The first time I go to Guzzler, the art historian David Homewood answers the door. Homewood is rakish and bespectacled, wears a pinstriped shirt buttoned to the collar and has a chain smoker’s complexion. He looks like a handsome human cigarette.

“Come in, come in, come in”, he says, bobbing up and down slightly. As he turns, the small of his back appears through a gigantic tear in the back panel of his shirt. I follow him through the house, down the garden path and into the gallery-shed. A photography show by the artist Zac Segbedzi is on. Segbedzi had recently returned to Melbourne after a stint in the US, presenting a solo exhibition at Jenny’s in Los Angeles in mid-2019 and assisting the artist Mathieu Malouf. In the Rosanna gallery, the glossy pictures are mostly of flesh (plastic and/or real) arranged in staged contortions: a man’s arse held aloft and stretched taut by a pair of disembodied hands; Barbie embracing a Ken doll with a plastic penis in the place of his head; an elaborate crucifixion of a woman in a neon-yellow thong, framed by a bouquet of acid-bright plastic flowers.