Amos Gebhardt is an Australian artist who brings a cinematic force to large scale moving image installations and photography, collaborating with performers, choreographers and sound artists. Gebhardt’s sustained practice of visually rich work is epitomised by a courageous commitment to agitating dominant narratives around marginality, representation, queerness and more than human ecologies.
The selection of illuminated works on exhibition at The Glen are drawn from a series entitled Small acts of resistance (2020) featuring portraits that defy normative notions of kinship and identity. Against a backdrop of social and ecological precarity, this series amplifies the poetics of personal acts of resistance.
Conventional concepts of family are challenged in a hyper-visual tableau vivant, where two fathers and loving friends make up the familial support network around a newborn. The intertwined objects and botanics reflect the personal and cultural through-lines that knit the family and its many stories of diasporic and queer unions together.
Another work features Eric Avery, a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist who plays the violin and sings the language of his father’s country. Here he floats above a road, a colonial scar pointing between his ancestral lands. This act of defiance against conventional laws of gravity reflects a deeper disruption of not only how a western instrument can be played, but how shuttered notions of place and time can be transcended through a rebalancing of earth, sky and body.
The series also includes members of the renowned ballroom collective House of Slé. Adorned in personal symbology, the Slé collective appears held by the magnetism of water and cosmos. This hyper-vision of elemental forces speaks to the power of traversing liminal spaces of queerness and cultural meaning.
In borrowing the visual language of pop culture, Gebhardt reorientates dominant narratives by centring the power of non-conforming pathways through portraiture, dance and photography to celebrate stories of resistance.
