ROBBIE MOTION

Had I Known

5 - 30 September 2025

This exhibition examines the relationship between images and the ways their meanings shift according to context. Images are never static or self-contained; they are continually shaped and transformed by their surroundings. The works presented here investigate this dynamic process, showing how meaning is not fixed but constantly renegotiated.

This idea echoes the function of hieroglyphic writing, where signs communicate meaning through sequence and position. A single image may carry a straightforward association, yet in relation to another, it can tell a different story. For example, a tree alone may symbolize life or growth, but paired with fire it suggests danger and destruction. Meaning emerges not only from what is shown, but from how it is arranged and connected.

With this principle in mind, the exhibition invites viewers to “read” images much like language, constructing narratives through the interplay of symbols, motifs, and fragments. Each image carries potential on its own, but in their combinations — through contrasts, echoes, and proximity — new interpretations arise.

The exhibition does not prescribe a single story. Instead, it creates space for multiple readings, shifting perspectives, and layered associations. Just as language is fluid and open to reinterpretation, so too are images. Ultimately, the gallery becomes a site of visual literacy, where images function as living signs: adaptable, transformative, and continually renewed.

Robbie Motion                                                                                  They See everything, 2025                                                                 Oil on Canvas                                                                             760mm x 760mm

Robbie Motion                                                                                     Self simulated 2, 2025
Watercolour on paper (210mm x 300mm)
440mm x 545mm (Frame size)

Robbie Motion                                                                                       Is this you?, 2025                                                               Watercolour on paper                                                                   210mm x 300mm, Framed

Robbie Motion                                                                                     Fill in the blanks, 2025                                                         Watercolour on paper                                                                   210mm x 300mm, Framed                                               

Robbie Motion                                                                                     How it happened, 2025                                                     Watercolour on paper                                                               210mm x 300mm, Framed           

Robbie Motion (b.1995, Ōtepoti Dunedin) studied Art History and Film and Media at the University of Otago. His painting practice began through creating artwork for album covers and posters for local Dunedin bands. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his paintings have a languid, distorted quality that is at once melodic and unsettling. Influenced by the work of Irish/British painter Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992), Motion's figures possess a certain vulnerability, with their limbs and faces distorted, obliterated, and overlapping; their outward physical contortions seeming to articulate internalised mental or emotional preoccupations.

Previous exhibitions include Not How I Remember It, Page Gallleries (2025), Boy Meets World, Page Galleries (2024); Artists on Artists, Twentysix + Aratoi Museum of Art & History (2024); A Body Was Here, Page Galleries (2022); Bodily Incarnations, Nomadic Art Gallery Online (2022); Alphabet Soup: The Finest Stock, Page Galleries (2022); Figure Skating, Page Galleries (2021); Sunlit Stairwell, Hunters & Collectors (2021), After Thought, Hunters & Collectors (2020); This Time With Feeling, Thistle Hall (2019).

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