Robert Andrew
Presence
31 August–26 October 201931 Aug–26 Oct 2019
IMA Belltower at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts
#RobertAndrew
Presence is a solo show by Brisbane-based First Nations artist Robert Andrew. Andrew expands on his kinetic installation practice to create a new physical landscape that combines programmable technological machinery with string, earth pigments, ochres, rocks, and soil. This work will change throughout the exhibition’s duration, creating a residue and revealing an internal core that references Aboriginal histories, stories, and connections. A deep sense of time and continuity is expressed in the work’s movement, invoking cycles enacted to and within the land.
The exhibition at IMA Belltower is accompanied by a new projection work developed in collaboration with Sai Karlen for the façade of the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts.
IMA Belltower at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts and the IMA are supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people of the Broome area in the Kimberley, Western Australia, and holds European and Filipino heritage. With this connection to different lineages, his artistic practice explores identity and history, often by combining natural materials and contemporary technologies. His works erode and expose substrates, build stories and create material traces. Andrew completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art in 2012 at the Queensland College of Art (QCA), accepting his Fine Art Honours in 2013. He is currently completing his doctorate in Visual Arts at QCA, Griffith University. Andrew has exhibited widely throughout Australia including: The National, Art Gallery of NSW (2019); Experimenta Make Sense, Latrobe Regional Gallery (2019); and Myall Creek and beyond, New England Regional Art Museum (2018). Recent solo exhibitions include: Data Stratification, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2018); an unforgetting, Pop Gallery (QCA Galleries) Brisbane, Queensland; and Our Mutable Histories, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane City Hall (2017).
Freja Carmichael is a Ngugi woman belonging to the Quandamooka People of Moreton Bay. She is a curator working broadly across cultural sector with artists and communities on exhibition projects. Her past projects have focussed on the preservation and promotion of First Nations fibre art and collaborative curatorial approaches. Carmichael recently curated Around and within, Space Gallery, Sydney (2018), and was a co-curator of The Commute, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018). In 2014, she received an Australia Council for the Arts emerging curatorial fellowship and the 2016 National Gallery of Australia International Indigenous Arts fellowship. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Macquarie Group First Nations emerging curator award. Currently, Freja is Curator IMA Belltower at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts and is undertaking curatorial projects with Redland Art Gallery, The University of Queensland Art Museum and is a member of Blaklash Collective.
Video
Video: Charlie Hillhouse.
