A homecoming. Luke Roberts returns to central Queensland as “a prodigal son, prophet or simply a curiosity”?
Roberts has exhibited and performed (as alter ego Pope Alice) all over the world. Yet his survey exhibition Beyond the Great Divide fittingly premiered at the Rockhampton Museum of Art in Central Queensland, a few hours’ drive from the town of his birth, Alpha.
Despite Roberts’s international reach, this exhibition is curated to celebrate his Central Queensland connections. At the exhibition opening event, Roberts suggested it was a homecoming.
“One of the main points of the exhibition has been the fact that it’s a homecoming to my home region,” Roberts says. “In my speech during the launch I posed the question, am I returning as a prodigal son, a prophet, or simply as a curiosity. A lot of my family, Alpha locals, friends and colleagues from all over Australia and the world, came to Rockhampton to be part of it.”
This show, in planning for six or seven years, is surprising for the scale of Roberts’s oeuvre and its importance in the progression of contemporary Australian art. Integral to this is the distance Roberts has travelled from his Central Queensland roots and the experiences that formed him – a complicated relationship with Catholicism, his queer identity and strong familial relationships.
Rockhampton Museum of Art director Jonathan McBurnie says the artist “has blazed a trail that many contemporary artists now take for granted”. “He is a kind of elder statesman,” McBurnie says.
The term “elder statesman” might conjure traditional art forms, but Roberts’s contribution to the Australian visual arts landscape, while monumental and sustained is also witty, irreverent and characterised by changing media and styles and theatrical camp.
Apart from his paintings, Roberts has made films, delved in photography and performed as Pope Alice. Roberts explores narratives from art historical imagery to express kitsch, queer and cosmic connections.
Dialogues with friends and art world figures such as artist Richard Bell and gallerist Peter Bellas, along with great art historical figures – such as Goya, Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo and Sidney Nolan – are central to this exhibition. Yet the way that Roberts’ biography is lovingly traced in so many of these images is its most revelatory aspect.
Pope Alice (Lake Galilee), 2009, is an image of her holiness in a dramatic landscape under the broad skies of the Galilee Basin. Essayist Michele Helmrich suggests that this image takes us into “a maelstrom of contested landscapes, the spectacle of Catholicism, a persona of heroic proportion wittily adopted, aspects of popular sci-fi culture, and truths exposed as falsehoods and vice versa”.
It is a searing example of the way in which Roberts can draw complex ideas and layers of meaning into an image that, once seen, is never forgotten.
This expansive exhibition currently dominates the Rockhampton Museum of Art. Strongly coloured walls hold dramatically large photographic works, often featuring Roberts in one guise or another, but also the Australian landscape, Catholic iconography and cowboys.
Large works are juxtaposed with groups of smaller ones, and with film. The overall impression is dazzling. While Roberts’s career has taken him far from his roots, the power and importance of his work is writ large.
“It’s a hugely significant experience for me, exposing myself to my family and the people I grew up with in a much more thorough and a much more deeply insightful way than I ever have before,” he says.
“My speech was soundly applauded and exceptionally well received, and the residue of the vestiges of early baggage have fallen away. It’s a showcase survey of over 50 years of my practice, resulting in relationships with my extended family and the people of the region taking a major leap forward. That was palpable to all who witnessed it.”
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Beyond the Great Divide opens with a car – a chariot built for Pope Alice that unites a VW chassis with neon horses – an artwork described as the Papal Odong-Odong.
Made to mark Pope Alice’s appointment as Patron Saint of Hobart’s Dark Mofo Festival in 2021, it may symbolise the ability of ideas to travel far from a place of origin yet, at the same time, be powerfully imprinted by it.
Luke Roberts: Beyond the Great Divide continues until November 3 at Rockhampton Museum of Art; rmoa.com.au/Home
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