Following on from Dr Drew Pettifer’s exhibition, “A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk”, Hollands takes the narrative of the shipwreck of the Zeewijk off the coast of Geraldton in 1727, where two marooned teenagers, Adriaan Spoor and Pieter Engelse, were isolated on separate islands and left to die, because of accused crimes of homosexuality. Hollands displays imagined images of 81 of the faces of the corpses of the men who sailed away, leaving the two to die.

Influenced by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, Hollands creates a visual portmanteau, capturing stills from his previous film, redrawing them and printing them on tracing paper. Mulvey posits, in her book Death 24 frames a second, that the tension between the still frame and the moving image captures the appearance of life and preserves it after death.

Hollands takes his last film – a film about queer vision, and the invisibility of the queer dead and inverts it to ask, what happens to the people who watch oppression, what happens to the viewers of atrocities, what happens to those who are complicit within the process of death.

Expertly and collaboratively lit by Luke Simpson, Simpson reanimates Hollands’ work within the space, creating a room of the living undead. Hollands and Simpson take these stills, moments from consciousness, turning them into breathing corpse shadows of a seminal moment in WA history.

James BL Hollands is a local professional artist and, although from London, has lived in rural WA for the past 12 years. He has been a practicing artist for over 30 years. He graduated with a City and Guilds in Stonemasonry and Sculpture in 1995 and undertook a Masters in Computer Art at Thames Valley University, London in 2008. He has held over 17 solo installations and hundreds of film shows. He has been exhibited globally including the Tate Modern, ICA and Whitechapel, London and Liverpool and Prague biennnials. James was the curator of “London’s Home of the Avant-Garde”, The Horse Hospital, for 7 years, and his work can be found in collections such as St Martins British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, London; BFI Archives, London; Clark, Montreal and Divus, Prague.

Luke Simpson grew up in Denbarker and began performing with the Plantagenet Players at age seven, sparking a lifelong passion for the arts. A graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Technical Productions: Lighting, Luke has worked across major venues including His Majesty’s, Crown, and the Regal Theatres, as well as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Since returning to the Great Southern Region in 2021, he has operated his own technical production company, designed lighting and audio for Southern Edge Arts, and helped deliver the 2025 technical overhaul of Albany Town Hall. Luke now also works as a Tour and Technical Manager with Onyx Productions and Breaksea Inc., touring both locally and internationally.