Lesser Gods has been commissioned and developed through Next Wave’s Kickstart program for Next Wave Festival 2014.

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EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2014LESSER GODS RYAN PRESLEY21 MAY - 7 JUNE

www.metroarts.com.au

109 Edward St Brisbane Qld 4001 T (07) 3002 7100E info@metroarts.com.au

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Chief Executive OfficerLiz Burcham

Program Coordinator (Visual Art)Amy-Clare McCarthy

IMAGES

Cover Transfiguration (detail), 2014.

1 / Lesser Gods (installation detail), 2014. Image by Eugyeene Teh.

2 / Heretic Cymatic Razorwire Baptism, 2014.

LESSER GODSRYAN PRESLEY

PROJECT PARTNERS

Metro Arts acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

METRO ARTS // EXHIBITION PROGRAM

Lesser Gods has been supported by the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival.

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Ryan Presley’s Lesser Gods is a personal manifesto. As you enter the installation through the head of the totemic saltwater crocodile you are immersed in a surreal cycle of images, animated paintings, gold leaf wood carvings and esoteric cymatic symbols drawn from Christian iconography. You have been swallowed like the biblical Jonah, a lesser prophet of the Old Testament, confined in the belly of the beast. The screen flashes and the dancefloor - an interactive podium - lights up through sensors under your feet. If you follow the signs on the screen and dance the sequence you create a sound piece like a musical algorithm, variations on a national theme.

Ryan Presley is a multidisciplinary artist and his work ranges freely across several media - from watercolour and oil painting, drawing and woodblock to ceramics and metalsmithing. Lesser Gods though is an exciting new tangent in his diverse multiform practice. Presley is yet another graduate of the degree course in contemporary Australian Indigenous art offered at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art. Presley is also recipient of the university’s 2009 Godfrey Rivers Medal for highest achieving student and went on to do a first class honours degree. He has recently opted to focus on a PhD and its subject is no less than the intersection of Christianity and colonialism in the Australian context.

Presley was born in 1987 and grew up in Alice Springs. His family moved to Brisbane when he was 11. His paternal family is from Peppimenarti around the Daly River region in the Northern Territory. His maternal grandfather was a professional artist who taught in Rome before he and his wife migrated to Australia to work in remote Aboriginal communities.

Presley works like an artisan, experimenting with visual language and learning new techniques along the way. Lesser Gods - commissioned for the 2014 Next Wave Festival - is much less solitary. He has worked with other artists specialising in animation and electronics, a producer and a sound composer to create an immersive, surreal and sometimes overpowering experience. But the artist’s hand is clearly obvious. Presley has created several new paintings which quote from the long iconographic tradition of Western religious art, from St George and the dragon, the Holy Trinity and the Transfiguration of Christ. But these paintings are surreal new imaginings which evoke the collision of fluid Aboriginal spirituality and dogmatic Christianity.

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RYAN PRESLEYLESSER GODS

The gouache, watercolour and gold leaf paintings are brought to life through a series of animations. A dark-skinned St George astride a water buffalo kills a ‘dragon’ (a prostrated judge) in the Australian outback. Pulsing, dripping hearts are encircled with razor wire. Great white sharks (a signature) patrol undulating waves as orange lifeboats - like those purchased by the Federal Government under its towback policy - float by. Lawmen dressed in blue jeans with flaming gold halos draw prophetic signs in the desert sand. Grasshoppers (as the frightened Israelites imagined themselves in the great expanse of the Promised Land) flit across the screen. Police and agents of Operation Sovereign Borders in riot gear get tasered. An astronaut in weightless flight drifts away.

The dance is a game. If you read the signs on the screen too closely and watch the dancefloor tiles illuminate you can become disoriented, or lose track, consumed with the game. Perhaps that is the point. This is no prefabricated dancefloor. Each of the 16 tiles has been designed, built and custom-made, fitted with sensors. A new invention, the dancefloor is itself a musical instrument – the music can be programmed and reprogrammed, and new sequences created. Here, Presley has collaborated with Robert Andrew, another graduate of the Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art course at QCA.

Pierre Clastres, in exploring the nature of ethnocide, writes that “ethnocide… admits a relativity of evil in difference… the others are bad, but they can be improved, by obliging them to transform themselves to the point of total identification… with the model proposed to or imposed on them”. Presley refers to a spiritual violence enacted on Aboriginal communities and speculates on the use of Christianity as a colonising force to suppress other belief systems, other ways of life. In Lesser Gods, dispossession and colonialism has an inverted, perverse double: Operation Sovereign Borders.

DANIEL BROWNING