Brook Andrew : The Right to Offend is Sacred

Beschrijving

Tent. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 03-03-2017, 04-06-2017. - The publication brings together more than 100 works by an Australian artist well known for reinterpreting colonial and modern history and offering alternative perspectives. Two new large-scale sculptures featuring bespoke wooden cabinets, a giant inflatable globe, and archival books, photographs and objects from Andrew’s extensive personal collection. The exhibition will map great moments in Brook Andrew’s 25-year career, and will look at the artist’s fascination with archival materials and strong interest in process that remain central to his practice. Andrew’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach encompasses mediums of photography, video, neon, text, collage, printmaking, assemblage, sculpture, painting and installation. In addition to Andrew’s new works, exhibition highlights will include the Gun-metal Grey series of 2007 which transforms deliberately darkened ethnographic photos of unidentified Indigenous people into haunting large-scale screen-printed portraits that seemingly appear and disappear, giving back the status, individuality and beauty stripped from the subjects by the colonial scientific lens.Three monumental 2.5 x 3-metre collage works from the 2016 Space & Time series feature archival photographs screen-printed on glistening foil, and embellished with bright paint and collage in order to reveal and counter hierarchies in the telling of history, and to emphasise connections between human beings across time and space.Andrew’s signature neon light works, Wiradjuri word plays and ‘Wiradjuri Op’ paintings comment on the relationship between consumer culture and Indigenous communities by combining the capitalist Western visual languages of advertising with Indigenous words and designs.