The first major survey of the artist’s work, Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye interrogated the politics of difference and, closely entwined, the implications of ‘the gaze’. Eye to eye, across land and cultures, Andrew explored the promising and yet fractured grounds of our contemporary intercultural engagement. Reflecting equally on global mass media and traditional grass-roots aesthetics, the artist asked viewers to consider the construction of history and power, identity and invisibility—in black, white and many shades of grey.

Covering the scope of the artist’s practice over the previous decade, the exhibition encompassed photography, printmaking, sculpture and neon installations. Deftly connecting aesthetics and polemics, Andrew’s striking and insightful works neatly encapsulated complex conceptual and theoretical questions that emerge from lived experience. In his apparently simple choreography of text and image, viewers saw the complexity and beauty at the heart of Brook Andrew’s work—in the poetics of space and public address, the spectacle of light and sight, in the echo of memory and the pressure of historical consciousness.

Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye was accompanied by a full colour illustrated catalogue featuring essays by the exhibition curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow; Anne Loxley, Penrith Regional Gallery; Associate Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne; and Professor Lynette Russell, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University.

Public Programs:
Lunchtime Art Forums: Brook Andrew
18 April

^{Image: Brook Andrew, Eye to Eye, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Monash University, Clayton Campus}