ROBBIE MOTION: NOT HOW I REMEMBER IT

Robbie Motion’s latest exhibition delves into the murky world of images and image-making. How, amid the perpetual flood of imagery we are presented with – across multiple platforms and purposes – does one create meaning? And as a painter, how does the artist reconcile their place within the production of images?

Not how I remember it, That’s it, you’re perceived, and Can you see yourself in this reflect the way images often become substitutes not only for memory but also increasingly act as stand-ins for lived experience; whereby the actual event or person or experience becomes secondary to the creation and dissemination of an image. In a gesture of playful artistic introspection, several works feature figures milling around in front of what appear be paintings of Motion’s own hanging on walls, but ironically, nobody seems to be looking at the images behind them.

The intention of the show is to explore the relationship between people and pictures; exploring the function of images in present time while also considering how these functions and meaning will ultimately change as time moves forward. Painting feels especially appropriate for executing this idea as it has been used throughout history as a source to gain deeper insight into the mood and values of the past. The works within the exhibition seek to be conscious of this tradition and ultimately ask the question, 'what will the images of our time say to future audiences? What will they assume of us’?

Motion came to painting via creating artwork for album covers and posters for local Dunedin bands. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, his paintings exhibit a languid, distorted quality that is at once melodic and unsettling. Influenced by the work of Irish/British painter Francis Bacon, Motion's figures possess a certain vulnerability, with their limbs and faces distorted, obliterated, and overlapping. He is adept at morphing and shifting between styles, forever seeking a wobbly point of tension through a simultaneous sense of push and pull. His work typically consists of a series of paintings within paintings; a discord of vignettes that come together to create a harmonious whole. Through this collage-like approach, the artist manages to create contemplative spaces that exist alongside the corporeal, sometimes more or less explicitly, as in the inclusion of a window or an open door. Similarly, Motion has a way of collapsing time in his work; classicism, myth, modernism, and contemporary culture are muddied together in an oddly familiar and fluid way, like the faint memory of a half-forgotten dream.

Robbie Motion (b.1995, Ōtepoti Dunedin) studied Art History and Film and Media at the University of Otago. He lives in Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara, painting from his home studio in the hilltop suburb of Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include Boy Meets World, Page Galleries (2024); Artists on Artists, Twentysix + Aratoi Museum of Art & History (2024); Horner Corner 3, Horner Artist Studios (2023) A Body Was Here, Page Galleries (2022); Bodily Incarnations, Nomadic Art Gallery Online (2022); Alphabet Soup: The Finest Stock, Page Galleries (2022); Figure Skating, Page Galleries (2021); Sunlit Stairwell, Hunters & Collectors (2021), After Thought, Hunters & Collectors (2020); This Time With Feeling, Thistle Hall (2019).