Dual/Duel (red binding)

Brook Andrew & Trent Walter / and an interview with, and protocol guidance by, Maxine Briggs. Melbourne : Garru Editions, Brook Andrew Studio and Negative Press, 2021 (printed in 2020). Quarto, gilt-blocked red cloth, 366 x 278 mm, edges dyed black, red and yellow endpapers, unpaginated; photobook of images selected from the collection of the State Library by Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, designed by Yanni Florence. Limited to 500 copies (with half bound in red and half bound in yellow cloth). New copy.

‘Dual/Duel is a collaborative artists’ book by Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, drawn predominantly from the State Library of Victoria’s pictures collection, with interventions from the artists’ personal archives. The book’s form is a series of juxtaposed image propositions whose assembly forms new relational narratives connecting the artists’ cultural perspectives of Wiradjuri/Sri Lankan/Celtic/European with topics of conflict, immigration, hope, confusion, complicity and power amongst image, shape, trickery, concealment and shadow play. This practice of image juxtaposition is prevalent in Andrew’s and Walter’s artistic and cultural practices which re-define how the world can be reordered and seen. This perspective shifts ideas around building memories, timelines and making visible often devastating histories in ways that can hopefully heal: to imagine new ways to engage and acknowledge.

Dual/Duel creates a new space for looking through often cliché, but specific, images of power and narrative. The artists’ book simultaneously creates and examines pictorial connections that explore
the implications of these associations to form new narratives about how we might begin to explain the histories they conjure. Dual/Duel is the result of a Georges Mora Fellowship awarded to the artists in 2014. The publication includes an interview with Maxine Briggs, Koori Librarian at the State Library of Victoria (SLV), Australia, who worked closely with the artists on Australian Indigenous protocols that apply to SLV photographic collections.’ – the publisher