Luke Roberts – AlphaStation/Alphaville

Luke Roberts – AlphaStation/Alphaville

17 June – 23 July 2011 

Luke Roberts has developed an increasingly prominent role in the Australian art scene over the past three decades. He has created an intricate idiosyncratic mythology that collapses personal and political, local and cosmological, and past and future to offer a unique spin on themes of religion, sexuality and human history. 

The heart of AlphaStation/Alphaville is a new body of photographic work produced over the last two years. The exhibition’s title refers to the artist’s birthplace of Alpha (deep in rural Queensland) and to Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 sci-fi movie). With a focus on self-portraiture, Roberts plays an Indian (with his father) and a shaman (with his mother), and imagines himself as Hitler, Andy Warhol and Edie Beale. He also appears with Indigenous artist Richard Bell in works that address the legacy of Australia’s colonial history. A display of Luke Roberts’ earlier oeuvre, stretching back to his first childhood experiments in performance and photography, sets the context for these new large-scale colour photographs. 

AlphaStation/Alphaville is a joint project with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.