We Come to This Place for Magic
A group exhibition exploring queer world-building and storytelling.
September 2025
We Come to This Place for Magic gathers new works by queer artists who create alternatives that sit in and alongside the canonical world, challenging any dominant narrative of what the “world” is. Especially in a moment when the wider world feels precarious, these works invite us to imagine and inhabit spaces where other ways of living, loving, and being together are not only possible — but already here.
Magic as folklore and ritual open pathways into these possibilities: In Theo Dunne’s painting, queer time appears as mythic fragments that refuse linear endings, staging grief and fantasy as overlapping states of transition. Marf Summers reimagines ritual through craft, where dyke druidism and trans-alchemy take form in a shrine that expose the uneasy pull between sympathetic magic and obsessive-compulsive magical thinking. Currents of these ritual practices also extend into Paul Majek’s altar-like installation, where Yoruba spirituality and family memory merge with queer desire, making inheritance a site of fugitivity as much as belonging.
Explore the show
These questions of inheritance extend into the work of Devynn Barnes, who transforms archival fragments into portals of Afro-surreal conjure, restoring suppressed Black queer presence and imagining landscapes of collective homecoming. Desire becomes atmospheric in Krzysztof Strzelecki’s sculpture, which depicts and invites the act of cruising to charge ceramics with sensual utopian possibility. And in a debut presentation by Lawrence Cuevas, porous forms, body and landscape blur, the clay embracing touch and vulnerability as a reminder that world-making is also an act of radical openness.
By holding these worlds together and in tension, we see how queer world-building itself is an act of magic. But here, magic is not illusion but proof for us all: the world can be made, unmade and made again anew.
