Recently relocated, Brisbane’s gallery Onespace has mounted a beautiful pairing of exhibitions to coincide with the opening of the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).
Brian Robinson (Kala Lagaw Ya/Wuthathi, Torres Strait) presents a multidimensional installation in the main gallery, moving between vinyl cut prints, a mural with wall-mounted sculptures and an expansive painting.
Robinson is a key figure in the Torres Strait creative sector and, with a major exhibition opening at the same time at the McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park in Melbourne, this is a timely focus on his work.
It is now 30 years since Robinson graduated from art school, and over that time his visual language has developed to a place of confidence and maturity. This compact show is a great celebration of that.
In the smaller gallery is a modest suite of works on paper and an ephemeral floor installation by Iranian artist Prita Tina Yeganeh, which coincides with a presentation of Iranian artists at QAGOMA, shedding a light on local diasporic communities.
Both exhibitions celebrate the practice of drawing across mediums, and weave traditional cosmologies and motifs with a contemporary desire to reclaim and keep alive those cultural practices.
Robinson’s exhibition invites viewers to rethink images of our future. He creates a multiverse of intercultural stories, drawing on symbols from Torres Strait Island cosmology – Zenadth Kes – and Western popular culture references such as The Phantom, Space Invaders and LEGO.
These are further woven into epic narratives that touch on environmental concerns in the Pacific, global sustainability and First Nations Land Rights. A great image in the show is Legacy: One umbrella, eight hundred and eighty thousand voices, sixty thousand years of occupancy (2022), where a fleet of Space Invaders hover over Old Parliament House in Canberra. Along with his other prints, they describe a contemporary intercultural world, where systems of belief coexist.
While referencing big head-spinning topics of today (and yesterday), Robinson’s work maintains a lightness and accessibility, and this presentation at Onespace is a great example of that. His vinyl cut mural that wraps the gallery walls, Vine Clad (2024), is expanded with LEGO, toys and palight plastic blooms that burst from the wall – nature seems to be the hero here.
His use of traditional of minaral (traditional Zenadth Kes patterning and designs), creates an impact at nearly five metres in blazing orange and black. Floral cascade (2024) encapsulates tropical vegetation and a deep-seated environmental message, and yet, painted in acrylic and enamel spray paint on palight plastic, it jives between the past and the present day.
Alongside this bite-size look at Robinson’s work is the second iteration of Iranian-born, Brisbane-based artist Prita Tina Yeganeh’s ephemeral floor piece, My Soil Farsh فرش (The Sacred Shared Labour).
Centre to her installation is 45 kilograms of red loamy clay soil that has been hand-ground and pounded by 17 women over 145 hours to create an earthy carpet, which she has then inscribed with traditional Iranian patterns.
This take on a traditional woven Persian rug speaks to the collective and ritualistic act of sharing labour and building a community with other women. She says it is about recentring the collective in a tradition that has become commodified. Being ephemeral, it pushes back against that drive for saleable decoration.
The carpet is beautiful in the space – and while it was ‘walked upon’ at the opening of the exhibition, the artist has chosen to leave that impression as part of its continuing narrative.
The designs in the carpet have been extracted into drawings pinned to the walls. There is no need to understand the meaning of these traditional Farsh motifs, rather she invites us to consider the fusion of material and motif. They have been 3D printed with the soil.
Read: Exhibition review: Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru, Australian Museum
Yeganeh is interested in practice-based research of heritage artisan crafts as a means to share narratives of displacement and cultural reclamation, and enable healing and reconnection. Experiencing, The Sacred Shared Labour is quite palpable, and one can’t help feel that genuine, sensitive action in this stunning project.
As a group of collective works, they come together beautifully in the small space without compromising scale or integrity for their making.
Brian Robinson: Blooms, Beasts and Beyond
Prita Tina Yeganeh: My Soil Farsh فرش (The Sacred Shared Labour)
Onespace
25A Bouquet Street, Brisbane
22 November – 21 December
Free.
