Growing up on the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, Brian Robinson drew on walls, windows, the kitchen table, the back fence. “Pretty much everywhere,” he told C-VILLE last month. “That creativity continued to grow and flourish” over decades of art-making, says the artist, who is now in his 40s, and has works in major public collections all over Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia.
About a dozen of Robinson’s recent linocut prints and etchings are currently on view at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in “Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars,” through May 31.
Robinson, who is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia, says his works take a look “at life in the Torres Strait, with a bit of a twist.” He writes in his artist statement that these pieces “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture”—such as the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and the Tardis from “Dr. Who” in “Mapping the Cosmos” (above)—“are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination.”
The artist will be at the Kluge-Ruhe for the “Tithuyil” opening reception on February 20 at 5:30pm. —Erin O’Hare