Peter Alwast: Being Together

Overview

Peter Alwast is a Brisbane artist who uses paintings, objects, sculptures and video portraits to explore ideas of community. His latest exhibition, Being Together, is a continuation of this recurring theme, as well as testing the limits and communion of seemingly disparate objects.

Alwast completed his Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in painting at QUT and was awarded the Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, which he used to complete his Masters at New York's Parsons School of Design. Since then he's exhibited in Australia and across the globe, including Experimenta Utopia Now at MONA and Selectively Revealed, which toured South Korea, Taipei and Thailand. His work is held in numerous corporate, university and private collections across Australia and the USA.

In this exhibition, gold chain-making machines belonging to Alwast's father are presented with video portraits of others from Brisbane's artistic community. They sit alongside a series of site-responsive drawings inspired by Alwast's former mentor, Richard Tuttle. Here, the personal and mechanical combine to create a fragile sense of community based on finitude, relation and communication rather than any idealised principle.

Being Together exhibits at The Block QUT from October 15 to 28.