This artwork’s data output is, as referenced in the title, disrupted by organic, site-specific materials. Andrew describes his chosen materials, including red ochers, stones, pearl shells and charred wood, as “having a voice” because they are sourced from personally meaningful locations, such as his aunt’s backyard, locations around his studio, and his maternal great-grandmother’s lands near Rubibi (Broome). By facilitating the machine’s output with these items, Andrew is literally making an earthy intervention in the machine’s translations.

As is evident in his technical production and interest in Indigenous heritage, both of the artist’s parents had key roles in shaping his practice. His father fostered skills in manipulating and constructing machinery. Andrew grew up spending hours at a time in his father’s shed, taking apart telecommunication devices and other electronics in order to learn the process of “thinking something up and then creating it,” as the artist puts it. His mother’s Yawuru lineage—and the complex relationship she had with her Indigenous identity—prompts reflection on what has been lost in the process of colonization.

“Disruptive (Ill) Logic” expresses dissatisfaction with the hierarchical and unreliable methods historically used by Anglo-European colonizers to record the artist’s Indigenous ancestors’ wisdom and limit their collective identity. The erasure of Indigenous culture via loss of language is a tragic symptom of Enlightenment-era attitudes toward non-Anglo-European cultures and the colonialist policies that were applied toward Australia’s First Nations Peoples. English is an outsider’s tongue imposed on the local populace, one that simplifies the expressions of Indigenous languages and subordinates them to a European norm. Yawuru, an ancient oral language, is but one example of a knowledge-sharing system that contains radically different concepts of time and space—heard in words such as buru or yarryirr, which colonizer anthropologists have translated as “country” and “we,” failing to capture these words’ essence in written English equivalents.

Additive and reductive elements will change the appearance of Andrew’s installation over the course of a few weeks. By the end of the exhibition, when almost all shades have been rinsed off of the windows, the whole artwork will be, literally, shown in a new light. Like the drastic difference between the wet and dry seasons in northwest Australia, this variable in the scientific process is representative of yet another failure to factor in an important lingual change to Indigenous lexicons.  

Robert Andrew’s “Disruptive (Ill) Logic” is showing at Metro Arts, Brisbane, until December 2, 2017.

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