Entropy Awakening Exhibition

At first, I just wanted to see what would happen.

What would happen if you commissioned an artist to create a digital artwork that critically engages with a piece of legal scholarship? Where would they take it? What would they see as important? How might it further the article’s analysis of public statues, law, and colonial legacies?

After I commissioned Travis, we would meet to discuss the artwork and our conversations would go rogue; free-ranging over much broader territory. Social conditions. Political agendas. Literature. History. Philosophy.

It was almost like a door was slightly left ajar, and then just the right combination of factors meant that we both walked through the door at the same time. Then the next second the research is just rolling and rolling and taking on a life of its own…

Something happened. Separate yet connected to the legal questions I had asked Travis to respond to in his art. Our research process – the creation of an artwork and reflection on the art-making process – laid the conditions for dialogue about sovereignty. Not only in the sense of First Nations sovereignty or the work that a Treaty or a Voice to Parliament might perform – but individual sovereignty. Agency. 

Listen to Marie and Travis discuss agency.

The neutrality of the replicated figure in Entropy Awakening is key. 

Listen to Travis discuss the figure.

Entropy Awakening actualised a profession in Travis’ thinking. But it is also more than that. It is a working through of Tear it Down (2019), Travis’ earlier graphic novel study.

The constraints of the commission format, ironically, also provided Travis space to think through the intense social media interest in Tear it Down, and the pressure he subsequently felt to create in a certain way. Entropy Awakening embodies Travis’ agency as an artist. It is his provocation for a more aspirational world, and on a personal level a more deliberate artistic practice. And it took me to a place outside the constraints of rules and regulations.

Listen to Marie and Travis discussing Tear it Down.

The research continues to morph and twist. As has been the way of it. Now, set to music. A reflection upon a reflection upon a reflection. 

This research project started as a law school hypothetical. What are the copyright implications of vandalising a statue within the copyright term? In seeking to study the dynamics of art, law, and justice through graffiti, what we have done is collectively participate in an experiment. An organic and dynamic meandering across disciplines, practices, and ways of seeing and hearing the world. 

Maybe this is the dialogue, brought to convergence, that I was seeking all along. 

If you get the right combination of people … it’s a bit dramatic to say you can turn the world upside-down … but for this project, we’ve essentially been able to do the thing that the original journal article, you know, challenged the public to do … in the original journal article there was a line around how anti-racist graffiti is valuable because it … confronts you, it makes you stop and think, and in that moment, you can then have these public conversations that our society needs to have … Without kind of realising it, I think … [we] fell into doing that. The research stimulated that public discourse at a microlevel between us.

Maybe the question when I commissioned Travis was never: what should we do about contested statues? Instead, slightly out of reach but there nonetheless – the real question was always: how do we become a little bit more flexible to engage more deeply with each other’s perspectives? To become a little more open to becoming more, together?

To make the leap from entropy to awakening.

Marie Hadley
Curator
25 August 2022

Animation credit: Entropy Awakening by Travis De Vries (2022)