12 October – 17 December, 2024

Update: Gary Lee's Heat/Keep Him My Heart is extended until December 17th by appointment. 

If you'd like to see the show, please get in touch via swarf.info@gmail.com or Instagram DM. 

Saturday, 12 October:

2pm – Script reading of Keep Him My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story

3-5pm – Exhibition opening and book launch

151 Melville Rd, Brunswick West, Wurundjeri Country

Heat/Keep Him My Heart is a solo exhibition of work by iconic Larrakia artist Gary Lee. The exhibition orbits around a script reading of Keep Him My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story, a play written by Lee in 1993 and published this year by Maurice O’Riordan’s imprint dishevel books. Here, the gallery becomes an expanded set referencing elements of tropical architecture from the 1890s and the 1990s. A verandah is the site of a casual radical encounter, the meeting of disparate worlds and scales of experience: aesthetic, erotic, familial, political. “Keep Him My Heart” is an Aboriginal English phrase that describes keeping love alive from afar in the context of a tale of separated lovers, layered with the forced separations of carceral enclosures and land rights legislation in the Northern Territory. 

Keep Him My Heart embodies Lee’s re-enacting of the principles of community-making through a collaborative writing practice that enables the keepers of family stories to participate in their representation. As Fred Moten puts it, “to write the / movement / of our viewing / in the moment.” At Swarf, the play mingles with relatives from other bodies of work including the Darwin Lads (2006) series and dami-tji-la (2021). Text and image trade places endlessly on Lee’s stage of “depth-feeling”, “picture-feeling”, “three-dimensional emotion.” Homoerotic studies of elastic masculinity lay alongside portraits of the heat of Larrakia Country as it is expressed in the tropical foliage, the colour of the dirt, the thickness of the clouds and the humid languor they incite. This is of course a multiple heat; of climate, of melting interculturality, of desire, and so too the moral policing the artist has had to elude. It’s a love story where realism is dosed out in the frank quality of the digital photo format in its adolescence in the 2000s, or in the municipal aesthetics lapping at the edges of a tropical scene, in the heat radiating from bitumen’s everyday colonial and environmental incursion. 

Exhibition coordinated by Tristen Harwood and Lauren Burrow.

Gary Lee. Dingo, 2006. Type C print. From the Darwin Lads series. 

Gary Lee. Keep Him My Heart, 1993. Promotional image for the play, pencil on paper. Collection: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra.