Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew | Wiradjuri people | Australia b.1970 | The Island V 2008 | Mixed media on Belgian linen | Purchased 2009 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist
Across Country: Five Years of Indigenous Australian Art from the Collection | 5 November 2011 — 21 October 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
Brook Andrew interrogates ideas about Australia being a savage or romantic land by examining an image from Wilhelm Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen (1862) held in the Haddon Library, Cambridge, UK. Kangaroos were feared in early colonial history and the original German notes accompanying this image state that ‘it has happened that a kangaroo has grabbed a person, carried him to water and submerged him until he has drowned’. In The Island V, an Aboriginal man is incorporated into the image, entangling him in these fantasies of the dangerous, exotic other.
