
Installation view: Archie Moore, born 1970, Toowoomba, Queensland, Kamilaroi people, New South Wales, Les eaux d’Amoore, 2014, eleven custom made perfume compounds in glass bottles, light boxes, shelves, digital displays, assorted testing cards, dimensions variable. Courtesy Archie Moore and The Commercial, Sydney; photo: Jessica Maurer
Les Eaux d’Amoore
9 Oct – 4 Dec 2015
Tarnanthi Exhibition
In this elegant and unusual exhibition, Queensland-based artist Archie Moore has devised a highly original way to explore themes of Aboriginal dispossession and the colonial past.
Moore has worked with a master perfumer, Jonathon Midgley of Damask Perfumery; to create a selection of beautifully presented ‘perfume portraits’ for Les Eaux d’Amoore. These olfactory offerings venture well beyond the repertoire of traditional perfumes; they evoke the artist’s recollection of the diverse smells of his childhood in south-east Queensland. For example ‘Presage’ is the aroma of graphite pencils and paper from his first day of school in an inhospitable white-dominated society; ‘Sapphistication’, a combination of Brut 33 and rum, and is the smell of his sophisticated aunties.
Les Eaux d'Amoore is an Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, exhibition presented in association with the 2015 Adelaide Film Festival.