Island of Misfits | Steve Lopes
Steve Lopes returns with 'Island of Misfits', exploring mysterious, imagined landscapes and their curious newcomers.
A figurative landscape artist, Steve Lopes builds a narrative within the landscape, continuing his emotive exploration of the migratory experiences of peoples to new places.
Anchored by his personal experience, Lopes’ lens looks to the history of migration to Australia and New Zealand over the last 100 years – countries that were considered the end of the world not too long ago.
Balancing the terrain of the familiar and unfamiliar, Lopes depicts unknown figures and empty landscapes accompanied by objects and trails for the viewer to encounter. The careful and curious placement of objects, and figures throughout the works speak of the migratory experience – with family keepsakes and tools carefully transported as memories and aids to these new found places.
Either still, or moving through the landscape, the silent figures represent personal and collective experiences of diaspora and displacement. Situated in the sometimes overwhelming and expansive landscape there is a sense of the epic journey ahead – whether the subjects are en route to a destination or metaphorically in the process of creating connections to a new place.
As a whole the silent landscapes and solitary figures are misfits together, presented in points of encounter. It is this raw, yet subtle expression of the emotive migratory experience that establishes Lopes as an evocative storyteller.
EXHIBITION
Steve Lopes | Island of Misfits
Until 1 July, 2017
Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane
Courtesy the artist and Mitchell Fine Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Michael Vale views colonialism as the elephant in the room when it comes to Australian history and Australian art. He observes that through a strange...
(for Michael Petchkovsky) You passed so quickly, it pulled the oxygen out of the air Drawing sorrow in behind you, like a myst Burning...
While most of Hobart is asleep, Maggie May Jeffries is crawling around in her backyard nasturtiums with a torch, finding inspiration in the intricate details...
i make it so that that every place i live is my home so i put my bed on the wall closest...
after Gbenga Adesina The first text message was sent as the year closed. Before that, red-faced men stood and demanded translation. They wanted us...
Evie Adasal always wanted to paint, but she hesitated. “I graduated from art school in the ‘90s in photography and film,” she recalls. “When I...
Frank was born in Singleton, New South Wales in 1959, and has been represented by Roslyn Oxley9 since 1982—a relationship that spans more than four...
Standing before a luminous artificial sun or walking through rainfall inside a gallery, audiences might mistake spectacle for Olafur Eliasson’s primary concern. Yet, beneath the...
The exhibition unfolds as an ode to Country, grounded in careful engagement with land and the ongoing presence of First Nations custodians. Slee returns, in...