Sydney photographer and compulsive nighthawk Joy Mei En Lai’s latest exhibition opens at Disorder Gallery on 13 June 2024 revealing the unsettling stillness and beauty of our city between dusk and dawn.

Nighthawks showcases a photographic series taken between 2020 - 2024, mainly around Lai’s inner-city neighbourhood. Each image captures a seemingly ordinary location and a quiet moment, vibrant in the darkness with crisp detail. A suite of motifs punctuates the series, from breezeblocks to bridges, shipping containers to abandoned cars.

Lai’s works are composed with the eye of a painter and executed with the technical mastery of a professional photographer. Every Nighthawks image thrums with possibility: something profound happened seconds ago or is on the cusp of occurring. Like Lai, we are both witnesses and prospective participants.

The opening of the Nighthawks exhibition coincides with the launch of Lai’s limited-run book of the same name. Lavishly produced, it includes the complete series forwarded by an essay from acclaimed writer, Mireille Juchau. This hand-numbered, hard-cover edition will be available through Disorder Gallery

Australian photo-media artist Anne Zahalka writes: Nighthawks takes us on a voyeuristic flight through the alleyways and streets of the city. Hovering behind the photographer, we see what she sees. Joy Lai captures her street scenes of the urban, ordinary and strange, with a keen and curious eye. She is hawk-eyed!

ABC Radio National’s Kate Evans shares:: Joy Lai’s photographs glow: with colour, light, attention to the beauty in the everyday and the unexpected. The angle of a staircase, graffiti on brick, the texture of cars, metal, asphalt and our urban lives. What a delight.

Award-winning author and artist George Haddad says: Joy’s photographs are high-octane narratives. To look at them is to be immersed in a multiplicity of stories and to be enraptured in what is beyond the image. The photographs raise feelings and questions, they do not serve to answer.

Joy Lai was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Trained in visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts, her work is held in public and private collections. A finalist in the 2023 Olive Cotton Award, her works have featured in SMH, Openbook and SL magazines, plus a recent verse anthology by poet Chris Andrews.

Lai’s photographs have appeared in many exhibitions, while her portraits of leading artists and writers include Michelle de Kretser, John Maynard, Richard Glover, Wendy Sharpe and Cressida Campbell.

Lai says: Like a lot of us, I walked at night during the pandemic to escape my small apartment. I channelled feelings of restlessness and uncertainty into images that try to present something disquietingly beautiful, however fleeting. The series has been simmering over the last four years and took on a life of its own. Documenting an off-kilter mood through lighting, texture, and form, all in hyper-real colour, was therapeutic. I was inspired by the disconnection in Edward Hopper's works and titled the series in homage to his 1942 painting, Nighthawks.

To chat with the artist, Joy will be attending opening night and be at Disorder Gallery each Saturday of the exhibition.

Join us for Opening Night of

D/O.86 Joy Mei En Lai - Nighthawks

Thursday June 13th from 5-7pm at Disorder Gallery

RSVP For OPENING NIGHT

Joy’s work will be on display from

June 13th through June 29th at Disorder Gallery