Presented through the lens of virtual reality, can’t buy me love is an immersive experience that purports to sell the audience the intangibility of spiritual enlightenment.
The very thought of VR is the fuel for millions of late night reveries about consciousness and reality.
- Jaron Lanier
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see…
- Rene Magritte
The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors. They have their exits and their entrances, and in his lifetime a man will play many parts…
- William Shakespeare
Amala Groom is a Wiradyuri conceptual artist whose practice is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies. Andrew Burrell (UTS, DAB, School of Design) is a practice-based researcher and educator who investigates the relationship between human subjectivity and virtual and augmented environments.
Presented through the lens of virtual reality, can’t buy me love is an immersive experience that purports to sell the audience the intangibility of spiritual enlightenment. It brings “reality” into a space that is “unreal” and where the item that is for sale is one that cannot be bought.
About the artists
Amala Groom is a Wiradyuri conceptual artist whose practice, as the performance of her cultural sovereignty, is informed and driven by First Nations epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. Her work, a form of passionate activism, presents acute and incisive commentary on contemporary socio-political issues. Articulated across diverse media, Groom’s work often subverts and unsettles western iconographies to enunciate Aboriginal stories, experiences and histories, and to interrogate and undermine the legacy of colonialism. Informed by extensive archival, legislative and first-person research, Groom’s work is socially engaged, speaking truth to take a stand against hypocrisy, prejudice, violence and injustice.
Andrew Burrell is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience, and exploration of memory as narrative. His process is one of worlding in virtual space—visualising otherwise unseen connections and entanglements. His ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments. Burrell’s practice ranges from traditional academic research exploring the creative potential for virtual environments to visualise complex relationships in information to large scale projects (often collaborative) in virtual environments. This practice is always framed by an underlying concern for developing ethical and sustainable methods for engaging with current and emerging technologies during a global climate crisis. He is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication, faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney and lives and works on Gadigal Country.
Exhibition catalogue
can’t buy me love is extended by a publication with production images, an introduction by curator Stella Rosa McDonald, a conversation between artists Amala Groom and Andrew Burrell and an essay by Madeleine Collie.
Design by Daryl Prondoso.
Learning resource
Gallery directions
UTS Gallery
Level 4, Peter Johnson Building (Building 6)
702 Harris St, Ultimo,
University of Technology, Sydney
can’t buy me love is developed with support from The UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building and the UTS Faculty of Law and as part of the 2021 UTS Artist in Residence Program.
