Lou Ellen & Brooke Van Der Linden
Through the power of the digital age and social media we can now place an assemblage of data on pages dedicated to our identities, beliefs, and interests. This amalgamation of information is often only a small snippet of one’s life. Information is often lost, ignored, or misrepresented in the large echo chamber that cyberspace has created. Through this lens, Lou’s work creates a jarring soundscape that traverses ideas of identity and place that interconnect and form a loop of sound, establishing a sense of the never-ending black hole that we all contribute to. Brooke’s video work largely uses imagery from books and magazines, scanned, and digitally manipulated; the process imitates the filters we place on our everyday lives as they enter cyberspace. In reference to growing up in the nineties, the work is exhibited on a CRT screen and uses dolls as a metaphor for identity. Although standalone works, the disparate scenes loop alongside the black hole of Lou’s soundscape, with no clear beginning or end.
Lou Ellen is a blak queer feminist visual artist and tattooist, whose practice spans mural painting, working with found materials and traditional mediums. Drawing from lived experience and family history, Lou Ellen’s work is often figurative, referencing the trauma and impacts of settler colonial white supremacy. Through the incorporation of narratives contiguous to identity: environment, connection to country, mental health, forced assimilation and the disarray of a society forced to live under corrupt government, Lou Ellen harnesses their art practice as a way of healing trauma. Brooke Van Der Linden is a queer multidisciplinary artist interested in collecting and repurposing materials.
Brooke completed their Fine Art Honours at RMIT in 2019 and has worked almost exclusively with a repertoire of found imagery, sourced from second-hand books and magazines, since 2012. Their practice spans from analogue and digital collage, to large scale textile-based installation, as they investigate the tension between analogue and digital landscapes symptomatic of contemporaneity.
On Screen, In the Flesh from Brooke Van Der Linden on Vimeo.