Tristian Koenig is delighted to announce the opening of Rebecca Agnew’s The Dabblers - a single channel 20 minute stop-motion claymation film, and her third solo exhibition with the gallery. The Dabblers continues Agnew’s fable-esque and Lilliputian perspective on human affairs and relationships, often articulated through anthropocentric narratives.
Rebecca Agnew’s folkloric-styled animated films utilise the obsolete form of stop-motion claymation to disarm the viewer. For many, this nostalgic form is familiar from childhood experiences and memories of watching television, with the narrative content of these productions more often than not subtly, and often heavily, didactic. Generational communication of skills such as language and math form one half of this didactic function, while the other teaches interpersonal skills, and the normalisation of relationships.
Turning this its head, Agnew’s narratives present the world asunder. Previous films such as Eve and Eve offered an alternative biblical narrative that veered in reading between Amazonian lesbian psycho-killer parable, to visualisation of Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’ (1914), which rendered the many layers of the unconscious through a multiplicity of identical female forms fashioned by Agnew from the proverbial primordial clay.
Her latest Anti-Oedipal filmic homily The Dabblers is Agnew’s longest running work to date. Clocking in at over 20 minutes, The Dabblers is epic in both scope and execution. Loosely inspired by the recent finding and exhumation of King Richard II's body from a carpark in Leicester, the film opens in a cave covered in mandala-like wall paintings. As the camera pans, cuts, and the soundscape slowly builds, we discover a world in which a mad king forces duck-vassals to undertake an archeological dig under the watchful gaze of a pantheon of shamanistic god-like figures. As the narrative develops, and the ducks uncover a skeletal human form, things turn decidedly sinister…
Rebecca Agnew was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, Aotearoa, in 1982. In 2004 she completed at Bachelor of Fine Art, University of Otago, Dunedin, before relocating to Australia and completing a Master of Fine Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne in 2012. In 2015 she was awarded the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship, with residencies undertaken with Waaw, Saint Louis, Senegal and Theertha Red Dot Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Agnew is presently a Studio Resident at Gertrude Contemporary, and in 2013 was commissioned by Artbank to complete a work for their permanent collection. She has led Animation Workshops for the inaugural Melbourne Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and previously received an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council for the Art in 2014. Recent exhibitions include Pink Frost, Tinning Street; Gertrude Studio Artists Exhibition, Gertrude Contemporary; Melbourne International Animation Festival; Waaw Gallery, Saint Louis, Senegal; Immaterial, Articulate Project Space, Sydndey; Interior 2.1 (TRAMA Centro), Guadalajara, Mexico and Video Arte Australia Nueva Zelande, M100, Santiago, Chile. Agnew’s work is represented in the collections of the University of Otago, Dunedin; Artbank and private collection in Australia and New Zealand.

no opening reception