Admission Notes, 2026
DJCS

I don’t know my room number, and I’m not sure what floor I’m on. A sign on the wall tells me I’m somewhere in the Heart & Lung Unit at Wellington Regional Hospital. I’ve been given my own room, thankfully, with a bathroom shared with one other person. There’s a window looking out toward what I think is Mount Albert, with Newtown folded below it. I count thirteen terracotta roofs scattered across the suburb, and four green ones clustered closer to the bush line on the hill. One church stands out with a red edging. Below, two red cars are parked facing left, one facing right. Near the centre of the view, a blue sign reads SUPREME LIMITED. On the far left, a pink façade with a rusted roof. Mount Albert is dulled by heavy green bush, looming. The sky is a pale, washed-out blue. Everything else settles into grey.

On Valentine’s Day, Saturday 14 February, we open Checkmate in COMMODE’s new gallery space on Level 4 of Anvil House. The exhibition takes its name from the gay cruise club and sauna that operated in Wellington from 1995 until its closure in 2020. The venue at 15 Tory Street closed under the pressures of post-earthquake redevelopment, followed by the financial weight of Covid-19. For Checkmate, I invited over 140 artists to send me a piece of trash to exhibit. Like cruising, contributors didn’t know who else had been invited and what was submitted.

Checkmate approaches cruising as a type of labour. The cruise club is not only a site of desire, but a workplace. It is a managed environment where intimacy is shaped by systems, profit, and particular choreographies. Liberation is negotiated through the architecture, lighting, cleaning, and rules about who belongs where. That logic mirrors the gallery more closely than we like to admit. Both are charged interiors. Both rely on invisible work to feel seamless. Both decide what is visible and what is removed.

The exhibition was nearly delayed because my heart failed again. My body can’t keep time, and there’s something fitting about that. COMMODE was never imagined as a seamless project. It was founded on what is broken, maimed, or failing. Disability is a condition of the space. Which feels especially appropriate following one of the first projects exhibited at COMMODE in late 2025, Fiona Clark’s The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe). Clark’s project sits with damage rather than aspiring to repair it. Bodies were broken and remade without pretending the break disappeared. And that has become a structural principle for COMMODE itself. It is a space that understands care as foundational.

For ten years I’ve been having episodes that feel like my heart stops. Without warning, everything drops out. My heart seems to pause, I panic, my vision goes, there’s a loud ringing in my ears. My legs give way. Sometimes I lose consciousness. It’s happened in situations where I could have seriously injured myself or someone else. For a decade I was told it wasn’t my heart. Doctors framed it as psychological… anxiety, stress… anything but a physical failure. I was prescribed medications unrelated to cardiac function, all of which I refused to take. The last bottle I picked up came with a warning: High risk of suicidal tendencies. It felt like the hint was to die quietly rather than do the harder work of finding a diagnosis. I’ve called ambulances. I’ve been admitted to hospital multiple times. I’ve had ECGs, ultrasounds, tilt-table tests, Holter monitors—every trick—but the episodes were always gone by the time anyone could see them. Nothing ever lined up.

In November 2025, a cardiologist finally implanted a loop recorder. On the morning of 3 February, just after 7am, I had another episode. I was sitting on my couch, drinking a coffee. Suddenly my vision went. My breathing became heavy. I started sweating. I couldn’t move. The next day the cardiologist called. This time they’d caught it. The top and bottom chambers of my heart had disassociated from each other. My heart had stopped. It flatlined for seven seconds, and I was told to admit myself to hospital immediately.

Above my bed is a sign. The title reads: Get Up. Get Dressed. Get Moving. Below it are instructions. One sticks out: Be sure to breathe deeply every hour. The room is stuffy, sealed with no openable window, no air conditioning. The air is so thick it almost feels like you’re not breathing at all.

COMMODE emerged from an intimate familiarity with institutions that manage bodies. I’ve worked in public, commercial and artist-run galleries since 2012, but the other side of my working life has been in rest homes and the sex industry. I can say with certainty that galleries, sex venues, and rest homes have far more in common than you’d expect. My mum is a nurse. When I was a baby, she took me to work with her at Kawaroa Rest Home. Later we lived in the backpackers and motels Mum was working at, and eventually onsite at the small twenty bed rest home she managed. That’s where I got my first job, working as a kitchen hand. Mum had a particular interest in dementia patients, and some of my fondest memories are tied to moving through the worlds they imagined. I learned early how reality can slip and re-form.

One of my favourite residents was Elsie Timms. Her world was vast, expansive in ways most of us never get to inhabit. One afternoon she came up to the kitchen window agitated. “Look,” she said, “we’ve all been sitting in there waiting for the train to Ōtorohanga all day and it still hasn’t arrived.” She gestured with her walking frame toward the residents seated in the main lounge. The carers apologised for the delay and told her, for her benefit, that the train had just arrived. We took her out to the rest home van, helped her in, and closed the door. After a minute, we opened it again. “We’ve arrived already?” she said, amazed. “That was an incredibly quick journey.” Her bags had already been unpacked. Dinner was at 5pm. Elsie was astonished by the efficiency and kindness of the train staff.

I’m a 31 year old male sitting in the window bay of my hospital room, looking out over Newtown. I’ve been looking out this window periodically over the last 24 hours. I think about the men in the rest home like Johnny, who were staunchly fixed inside their routines. Every morning at 6am he’d walk to the same chair in the main lounge and sit there all day, staring in the same direction. The hours were broken up by a shower, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, then an early bedtime. He refused to eat anything green. “I’m not a farm animal.” If anything in that routine slipped, he’d sour.

Adrian used to come into the cruise club every Thursday at 5pm for the five years I worked there. He had to leave by 9.55 to catch the bus home. He’d walk in yelling, “A cup of tea, love—and bring the tide in.” I’d fill his cup to the brim, though it was never full enough. “Another one, Dan, and leave the teabag in.” Most of the men like Adrian were retired, and all of them had something grumpy to say about everything on the 6’o’clock news. As I get older, I catch myself wondering whether all men are slowly ageing toward the same grouchy decline. At least my heart failure and the scars on my chest are daily reminders to live life to fullest and resist the male urge to whither into work’a’holicism and bitterness. One day I heard a loud thud and rushed into the club to find Adrian dead on the floor. He’d huffed too much amyl, which reacted with his heart condition and caused cardiac arrest.

These experiences sit at the centre of how I curate. I’ve seen fantasy and ruin up close, alongside the labour required to keep everything functioning: cleaning, repairs, the management of bodies, mood, risk, and mess. My practice has always paid attention to what—and who—gets left behind. Residue becomes evidence. It’s through residue that I read the gap between liberal ideas of freedom and the working realities beneath them. When I left the rest home, my Mum gave me all the old walking sticks, frames, a wheelchair and the commode that was being replaced. I’ve carried them around with me for years. Recently I used the walking sticks to hold up the gallery’s manifesto I wrote. The commode is where the gallery’s name comes from.

One of the most undignified deaths I’ve heard of involved a commode. Joan was otherwise healthy, though she could be nasty. One night she got up to use the commode in her room, tripped on the piss mat, hit her head on her dressing table, and shat herself. She died in a puddle of her own shit. The night nurse found her. Horrified, she put her body in a wheelchair and showered her. She was then investigated by police for disturbing the body. And that’s what can happen. Your heart can stop while you’re having a morning coffee, or you could trip and drown in your own shit.

On Saturdays the commodes and piss mats would routinely be taken outside for a hose down and left in the sun to dry. Afterwards, morning tea would often consist of either date scones and cheese scones, or pikelets with cream and jam. All of our openings are going to happen on Saturdays, with Checkmate beginning on Valentine’s Day. Openings often consist of beer and sparkling water, and BYO is encouraged.

The man who delivers meals to the ward came into my room and asked what my dietaries are. I said I don’t eat seafood or pork. He said today’s lunch was pork, so perhaps I’d opt for bacon and egg quiche. I said bacon, like pork, is from a pig. He stared. I said I don’t eat pigs. Hospitals are like galleries. All of these spaces promise some kind of optimisation. Being able is paramount, and if you’re not, you must aspire to be. Really though they are quietly organising bodies through surveillance, schedules, thresholds, and risk management. You learn quickly which bodies move easily. Also how much labour it takes to maintain an illusion of autonomy. Flatlining makes that fiction impossible to sustain. Suddenly, the body is revealed as a fragile infrastructure. The gallery programme could cease at any moment should the heart stop.

COMMODE exists in the overlap between cruising spaces, hospitals, rest homes and galleries because all of them organise bodies under pressure. All of them reveal, if you look closely enough, how much work it takes to keep certain bodies moving, and others out of sight. The exhibition Checkmate is not about overcoming that reality. It is about staying with it.