r e a is an artist, curator, activist, researcher, cultural educator and creative thinker
r e a (they/them) is from the Gamilaraay/Wailwan and Biripi peoples of NSW, they currently live and work between the Blue Mountains & naarm. r e a is an experimental interdisciplinary artist / curator / activist / researcher/ cultural educator and creative thinker. Their creative practise-led research extends over three decades, their art often focuses on unveiling the silence of the colonial archive. Their creative research extends into the reclamation and reframing of the bla(c)k queer body, as they re-story Indigeneity and bla(c)kness! Their extensive research includes the examination of contemporary discourses, which as yet have not changed the colonial narrative of Aboriginality. r e a’s work is centred in the visual arts and located in experimental digital technologies that intentionally, disrupt and disturb a history of silence. Their art consciously draws on a legacy of lived experiences, ancestral knowledge and the impact of intergenerational trauma, grief and loss. ‘My art is the practice of reclamation; a disruption of the colonial gaze through re-storying the blak-body as a point of protest.’
2-page.CV (pdf download)
r e a
Selection of r e a’s works in the NGA: https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/artist/9649/r-e-a?
no.5 from the series ‘Look Who’s Calling The Kettle Black’ series (1992) edition of 15.
*r e a’s maternal grandmother c.1920’s Ruby Pearl Leslie (nee.Williams-Madden)
NGA Learning Resources Link: https://nga.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/the-role-of-the-artist-secondary/r-e-a/
“Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes. It is not simply about giving an oral account or a genealogical naming of the land and the events which rage over it, but a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying. The sense of history conveyed by these approaches is not the same thing as the discipline of history, and so our accounts collide, crash into each other.” — Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, p. 28)
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Other URL Links . . .
r e a
Belonging – Stories of Australian Art
National Gallery of Australia
This major collection presentation recasts the story of nineteenth-century Australian art. Informed by the many voices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures and communities, the display reconsiders Australia’s history of colonisation. It draws together historical and contemporary work created by more than 170 artists from across Australia.
Belonging: Stories of Australian Art reveals different stories and connections between art, people and Country in its presentation of visual art and culture in Australia before 1900. The display highlights the endurance and resilience of Indigenous cultures and custodianship, as well as the impact and ongoing effects of colonisation.
NAVA – National Association of the Visual Arts
October 28 2019 , by Penelope Benton
r e a is an artist, curator, activist, researcher, cultural educator and creative thinker whose work draws on a legacy of lived experience and the impact of intergenerational trauma, grief and loss.
database and e-reserach tool for art and design researchers
r e a – online profile with DAAO
Talking Place – Bundanon Trust
“These days it seems everyone is talking about ‘curated places’. Chances are your local shopping strip has already been or soon will be ‘curated’ within an inch of its life. It’s interesting because sometimes this proliferation of place rhetoric seems to take us further and further away from where we are.” – Michael Cohen.
Talking PLACE is an opportunity for the arts sector and other stakeholders to come together and discuss the motivations and ideas behind experimental and site-specific arts programming occurring across regional Australia.
r e a - artist | curator | activist | academic | cultural educator 