The Adelaide Salon presents Male Gaze, an exhibition of artworks by Tony Mentel exploring intersections of queer history through the languages of needlework, tapestry, mark-making and ceramics.

Drawing on craft traditions and religious iconography — mediums historically coded as feminine — the works question authorship, labour, and inherited ideas of masculinity.

Mentel’s practice examines the relationship between narrative and identity, weaving together queer histories and the psychological landscapes of the self.

He engages with the idea of coding — the ways queer stories have historically survived through symbolism, gesture, and hidden language. Across centuries, from Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies to later periods shaped by social taboo, queer narratives often existed in coded form: embedded within decorative arts, religious imagery, craft traditions, and visual allegory. These hidden languages created spaces of recognition — subtle signals exchanged across time between those able to read them.

Refined, labour-intensive surfaces draw the viewer’s eye into sumptuous detail, colour, and texture, creating a powerful contrast between the delicacy of the decorative language and the often dramatically charged narratives they contain. Working in a medium rarely associated with male artists allows Mentel to challenge gendered expectations while reopening conversations around labour, intimacy, and vulnerability.

Recycled fabrics and beads function almost as talismanic materials, holding emotional histories and traces of lived experience. Materials once worn close to the body or connected to social and domestic spaces carry their own memory as material.

Within this exhibition, metamorphosis emerges as a guiding principle: transformation as survival, adaptation, and revelation. Like the mythological narratives of antiquity, where bodies and identities shift form, the works suggest identity as fluid and continually becoming.

Mentel’s compositions frequently centre on the human figure, constructing scenes in which gesture, gaze, and spatial perspective guide the viewer through layered narratives. The gaze itself becomes an active element within the work — directing attention, suggesting intimacy, and subtly negotiating the relationship between observer and subject.

Male Gaze invites viewers to look beyond surface beauty and decode the layered languages within — uncovering histories once hidden and recognising the quiet persistence of queer presence across time.