Monash University > MUMA > Exhibitions > Past exhibitions > 2007

Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye

Brook Andrew
Replicant: Parrot 2006
Ilfochrome print
Courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Monash University Museum of Art
4 April - 23 June 2007
Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest
18 August -- 14 October 2007
The John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth
4 April - 30 May 2008

Curator: Geraldine Barlow

The first major survey of the artist's work, Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye interrogates the politics of difference and, closely entwined, the implications of 'the gaze'. Eye to eye, across land and cultures, Andrew explores the promising and yet fractured grounds of our contemporary intercultural engagement. Reflecting equally on global mass media and traditional grass-roots aesthetics, the artist asks us to consider the construction of history and power, identity and invisibility; in black, white and many shades of grey.

Covering the scope of the artist's practice over the past decade this exhibition encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and neon installations. Deftly connecting aesthetics and polemics, Andrew creates striking and insightful works which neatly encapsulate complex conceptual and theoretical questions which emerge from lived experience.

In his apparently simple choreography of text and image, we begin to see the complexity and beauty at the heart of Brook Andrew's work -- in the poetics of space and public address, the spectacle of light and sight, in the echo of memory and the pressure of historical consciousness.