WHEN : 27 November — 26 February
WHERE : IMA
Luke Roberts
AlphaStation/Alphaville
Performance artist Luke Roberts has been a key figure in the Brisbane art scene for over three decades. He has developed a mythology that collapses personal and political, local and cosmological, and past and future to offer a unique spin on themes of religion, sexuality, and human history.
Roberts started doing drag performances as Alice Jitterbug in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s, this persona was superseded by Pope Alice, who was related in part to both Pope Joan (the legendary cross-dressing female pope) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. According to Roberts, Pope Alice came from the planet Metalluna, and landed at Alice Springs, giving her name to the place. Through this alternative-pontiff persona, Roberts has been able to contest the Catholicism in which he was raised (particularly its repressive attitudes to sexuality), while drawing on its paraphernalia and iconographies.
