Grassroots organizations like Extinction Rebellion have been battling to raise awareness and turn back the tides of disaster in our climate systems, ecological collapse, and loss of biodiversity. But how many listen, and how many bankers and corporations summon the resources that will be necessary to reverse the extinction of species and biodiversity?
As a worldwide virus sweeps through the species, causing a scale of suffering and fear not experienced in a few generations, the topic of our own extinction presents itself boldly and with no opportunity to negotiate.
Enter ROA and his newly opened show which you are able to attend by appointment only, called “Annihilation”.
During his Street Art career of the last decade and a half, his focus has often been on the marginalized and endangered and our culpability – directly as it relates to the animal kingdom but also by extension it is a metaphor for the human condition. Taking extinction one step further, the word annihilation captures the deliberate violent intention behind the killing, decimating, wiping away a record with great finality.
The Ghent based Street Artist and studio artist cannot invite you to the Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne unless it is by appointment, so hostile is the natural world toward our immune systems right now. But he says in his press release that the new show “is ROA challenging us to quietly focus, observe, and investigate nature without the noise of current climate discourse.”
Looking at his collection of images from the animal kingdom rendered in the distinctive style that he has painted on hundreds of walls across the world, he tells us that this exhibition is “an invitation to reconnect to nature, to empathize, and as the dominant species, to recognize that the choice is ours alone to ensure all of nature’s survival, not just our own.”
Annihilation
ROA
March 20 – April 05, 2020
Backwoods Gallery
25 Easey St Collingwood
Melbourne Australia
“Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.”
− Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC ~ 43 BC)
By appointment only : info@backwoods.com
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