Paradise Regained:
Headlands and Skylands
4 December 2005 - 29 January 2006
Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland, Gallery 1
Curated by Emma Bain.
Luke Roberts is one of Australia's best known conceptual artists. His performances – as alter ego Pope Alice and others – photography, and installations have featured at Australia’s leading art events – the Biennale of Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery's Asia-Pacific Triennial, Art Gallery of New South Wales' Australian Perspecta, and numerous international exhibitions.
Painting, always part of his practice, has taken something of a back seat to its more theatrical counterparts. Yet it is painting which forms the back bone of this exhibition and, Roberts has chosen it as the preferred medium to respond to the restorative 'headlands' and 'skylands' of North Stradbroke Island, an edenic haven for him over the last three decades.
This exhibition marks a new phase for Roberts – one which promises as much surprise, engagement and depth as we've come to expect from one of Australia's leading artists.
Catalogue essayA human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty…We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Albert Einstein (1954)
Planet Earth is the cosmological equivalent of a provincial town.
Pope Alice (Mission Statement)
Luke Roberts and his many artistic alter egos have worked at the cultural edge in media ranging from performance to installation, film and photography. The conceptual depth and breadth of his work and its unique cultural commentary and humour has seen Roberts’ work included in biennales, exhibitions and collections throughout the world. His has been a unique art journey – with a series of narratives interwoven with a quartet of theatrical personalities – primarily his self-created guru Pope AliceA, but also Frida Kahlo, Alice Jitterbug and, at times, Jesus Christ. As a result, while Roberts has always made paintings, much of his artistic output has been ephemeral – its photographic documentation the only record of its peripatetic existence. So, an exhibition of paintings on canvas, springing from the naturalistic paradise of North Stradbroke Island may seem a strangely conventional place to find him. Or is it? (This eventuality brings joy to the heart of Pope Alice, who wrote of Roberts in 1999, “We do wish he would paint more.”B)
This exhibition, the result of a four week residency on North Stradbroke Island (August –September 2005), sees Roberts reflecting on his creative journey and a new future. For him there could be no better place for this process than North Stradbroke Island, a retreat and sanctuary over some 33 years. With this project, Roberts has pared back from the “Museum of the Cosmos” scale on which he has worked in the past, to painting and drawing. This has provided a microcosmic focus, furthering the cogent interrelationship of his ideas, a testimony to the breadth of his artistic imagination. The leitmotifs of his journey – the cosmic egg, the solar barge, celestial barques and Pope Alice’s Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonders) – all ride shotgun on the Stradbroke spiritual, physical and emotional journey.
The visitor to Stradbroke necessarily surrenders his or her usual head space – just driving onto the vehicular barge at Toondah Harbour (near Cleveland) heralds the beginning of the process of letting go. The 40 minute journey across Moreton Bay accompanied by engine vibrations, sea breeze, and occasional rough passage kick-start the flight of life’s daily concerns. Arriving at Dunwich and heading for Point Lookout and the surf, civilisation retreats further with increasingly erratic mobile phone reception and the exoticism of the coastal vegetation. At Point Lookout, on the ocean side of the island, the physical and natural beauty of the place is overwhelming – the driving on-shore breeze, the exertion inherent in climbing the dune on Deadmans Beach or that up the steps from Frenchmans. Standing on the rugged headlands which enclose the climactic South Gorge, you may look back to the dangerous eddies of Frenchmans Beach and then south to the endless expanse of Main Beach which extends toward, but never quite connects with, the foreign country that is the Gold Coast.
As if that were not enough, the wildlife is overt and compelling. Between July and November, people gather on the headlands, transfixed, staring out to sea, waiting for a vision that somehow renders us whole, the migrating humpback whales. But all year round it is a rare experience to walk the South Gorge and Headlands (a halcyon journey that starts and finishes at the same place as though you’ve dreamt it, or entered the voluminous space of Dr Who’s tardis from a telephone box) without stopping to observe and wonder at dolphins, manta rays and turtles in the sea, Brahminy kites in the air and great grey kangaroos treating street and bush alike. Roberts’s depiction of South Gorge in The Flying Saucers of Ezekiel unifies the strangeness and spirit of nature with the possibility of a visitation from an alien presence, and captures perfectly the essence of the magic of the place.
Roberts first travelled here as an art student in 1972. With the exception of a few years when he was living in New York (1996–97) and Europe (1984–87), he has been a constant visitor. His sense of North Stradbroke Island is as a retreat, a haven which exists somehow outside our ordinary world, as a place of meditation and healing. It is also, in his view, a destination which has intrinsic power to take us to another place both within and without – all evident in these new paintings. Interiors are a melange of exotic objects. Landscapes depict the detail of the lush vegetation in a Fauve-like journey of colour and mystery. Spiky fronds of pandanus punctuate a secret inner world in these images of plants and flowers. There is a sense of another strangely alien existence under the abstracted detail.
These images, journey and destination, are infiltrated by other ideas and presences from Roberts’ visual language. The solar barge, the mythological journey of the Egyptian sun god Ra riding in a boat, is symbolised in the surfboard shape. And the cosmic egg, a disc shape in the sky, represents the low key presence of Pope Alice in these works.
To Roberts, Stradbroke Island is truly a Garden of Eden, a place where other presences are much stronger and more overt than in the cities where we have “paved across them”C. Other images, of figures and horses described with verve and energy, conjure up the tropical paradise to which artists like Gauguin have been drawn in the past and point to Pope Alice’s spiritual homeland in the Pacific Island of Mu.
In recent years Pope Alice has become an increasingly urgent messenger, seeking to connect with the public and revealing more of herself as an alien-looking personage. In Paradise Regained we can look again at our own myths and reassess the pieces of the story we have to date. There is no cultural cringe here – paradise is on our doorstep. But what is it really? Who is responsible for the parallels between the larger cosmic questions and the wild beauty of this paradise?
For decades, Roberts has explored the connections between art, religion and science. Historically close, these have drifted apart but now draw together once more. In these spiritualised landscapes of headlands and skylands, the overwhelming exuberance of nature points to a web of connections with our past, a possible future, and the challenge of the present. In words from The Day the Earth Stood Still, “The decision rests with you”.D
Text by Louise Martin-Chew
A Pope Alice fell to earth through a black hole in the year 5252ABCD. She landed at Uluru, having bounced from Alice Springs (which still bears her name). She journeyed throughout the Great Continent of Mu in the Pacific Ocean where she was proclaimed Spiritual Leader. Her most recent audience was in Newcastle on October 14 & 15, 2005, where she was accompanied by the Acting Lemurian Ambassador and President of the Pope Alice Xorporation, Dr Solomon Robstein.
B Vanitas Pope Alice Presents Luke Roberts, IMA, 1999
C Interview with the artist, August 2005
D The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951, 20th Century Fox (a favourite film of Roberts’).
Luke Roberts was born in Alpha in Central Western Queensland in 1952. He studied at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney in 1971, and then at the Queensland College of Art from 1972–74. He lived and worked in Europe 1984–87, and was the Australian Fellow and Resident Studio Artist P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York 1996–97. His work was included in the 13th Biennale of Sydney (2002), Australian Perspecta (1995, 1991) and the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1996) and is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. He conducts his practice from a Brisbane base.
Image: Luke Roberts, Paradise Painting (detail)
Courtesy Bellas Milani Gallery and Philip Bacon Galleries