Holding his violin and bow down by his sides, Eric Avery floats barefoot, suspended above a red dirt road bordered by saltbush. Behind him is the graduating blue of a cloudless sky reaching towards a horizon line that splits the composition in two. Created near Lake Mungo in New South Wales, where Ngyiampa Country meets Mutti Mutti Country, Amos Gebhardt’s Eric is a portrait of violinist, vocalist, dancer and composer Eric Avery (also known as Kabi Marrawuy Mumbulla). A Ngiyampa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangir artist, Avery’s compositions often incorporate song in Ngiyampa, contributing to the survival of the language of his father’s Country.
Eric forms a part of Gebhardt’s portrait series Small acts of resistance, which encompasses a video installation and suite of photographs that disrupt dominant narratives around representation, marginality and queerness. The portrait centres Avery as an artist who liberates the possibilities of the violin through his powerful personal and cultural expression.
At the centre of the image is a road – a Western intrusion on Country – described by Gebhardt as ‘a colonial scar’ that straddles Avery’s Ancestral Lands. Gebhardt sees the elevation of Avery as an act of defiance, dislodging notions of Western order and expectation. In defying the laws of gravity, Avery’s elevated state offers ‘a rebalancing of earth, sky and body’. It is also an act of transcendence, repositioning the art-historical archive of levitating saints that stems from early Christian iconography.
The photographic works from Small acts of resistance are framed in wooden boxes with trifold hinging. This presentation references the frames that might house a family portrait or a religious altarpiece, to ‘position’ what the artist describes as ‘non-conforming pathways as sites of divinity, belonging and reworlding’. Themes of resistance and devotion are at the heart of the photographic series and are meaningfully articulated in Gebhardt's choice of their subjects. ‘It’s important to me that open-ended ideas of love and resistance are celebrated, so that they can form powerful counter-narratives,’ Gebhardt says. ‘Sometimes resistance can be really small and deeply personal – but it matters.’
Purchased with funds provided by Susan Armitage 2024
© Amos Gebhardt
Susan Armitage (1 portrait supported)
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