The Koorie Heritage Trust presents insideOUT – a solo exhihition by Ngarigo artist Peter Waples-Crowe that seeks to challenge binary constructs and heteronormativity.
Waples-Crowe will transform the Koorie Heritage Trust into a blak-queer hub to bring stories from the outside, in and investigate the meeting points of where Aboriginal and queer cultures intersect.
insideOUT brings together Waples-Crowe’s multidisciplinary and collaborative practice, with works made over the past 12 months as artist-in-residence at the Koorie Heritage Trust. It will showcase his distinctive collage works, as well as new experimentations with animation, fashion and live-art activation, insideOUT builds space for queer and blak people, stories and experiences.
With a great sense of irreverence and humour, Waples-Crowe reveals contemporary issues of community and belonging – reflecting his own intersectional identity as an Emerging Queer Indigenous Elder.
For Waples-Crowe the gallery is also an artwork, one in which his art interacts, and as such, an architectural intervention has been constructed in the gallery that will become a safe meeting and performance place for queer and Indigenous communities throughout the exhibition.
Waples-Crowe explores themes of being simultaneously on both the inside, and the outside. “I’m inside the culture because I’m Aboriginal; I’m outside because I’m queer. I’m inside queer culture because I’m queer, I’m outside because I’m Aboriginal,” he says.
Peter Waples-Crowe is an awarding winning Ngarigo artist whose visual and performance practices operate in the intersection of Aboriginal identity, Koori spirituality and Australia’s ongoing colonisation. Waples-Crowe has been a finalist in nine of the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards and won 10 major awards, as well as a finalist in three Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
insideOUT
Koorie Heritage Trust – Yarra Building, Federation Square, Melbourne
Exhibition continues to 28 July 2019
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.koorieheritagetrust.com.au for details.
Image: Peter Waples-Crowe (Ngarigo), campOUT, 2018, collage and acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist / Peter Waples-Crowe (Ngarigo), The Fetish Stick, 2018, collage and acrylic on canvas – images courtesy of the artist.