Step into the shadows.
Opening Night:
6:00pm, Thursday 27 August.
Gallery hours:
Tuesday-Friday: 10am-5pm
Saturdays: 2pm-6pm
Sundays: 9am-12:30pm
Part of NIGHT MOVES – exploring what we keep hidden in our darkest corners.
About
Step into a shadowy environment where light reveals, reflects, and deceives. In this immersive installation, Kuweni Dias Mendis and Grant x Wilkes create a sensory experience that draws on the mechanics of optics, testing what it means to see and be seen. Mirrors fracture perspective, screens pulse gently with shifting images, and handmade objects anchor the space with material presence. Light becomes both instrument and subject; unsettling the boundary between observer and observed.
The collaboration brings together Dias Mendis’ commitment to natural materials and elemental processes with Grant x Wilkes’ ongoing interrogation of image-making across analogue and digital forms. United by a shared dedication to process, their work creates a rich and intimate space for audiences to navigate their own role in the image.
Building on their award-winning collaboration (Metro Arts Experimental Portraiture Prize, 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize), this exhibition extends this collaboration into a third dimension of experimentation with representation, materiality, and the unstable nature of images.
Kuweni Dias Mendis is a Sri Lankan-born, multidisciplinary artist based in Australia since 1999. As a diasporic artist, her work reflects her diverse experience of culture and identity. She works across raw mark making, Yantra drawings – symbolic drawings from ritual art in Sri Lanka – installation, performance and video art.
Australia has deeply influenced her artistic practice, focusing on integrating an art practice between regenerative, arts activism, and cultural facilitation. Kuweni is a certified Regenerative Practitioner from Regenesis USA. She uses ritual and ceremony as the source of her artistic manifestations and creative inquiry into the pulsation of place.
Kuweni has been an advocate for marginalized groups of women, and she uses her practice to amplify these voices to create social change through co-created artwork, participatory art experiences, exhibitions, merchandise and public artwork.
Grant x Wilkes is a collaborative partnership between artists Claire Grant and Lee Wilkes that explores the evolving relationship between image, material, and process. A deep curiosity for photographic experimentation and material innovation drives their work, pushing the photograph beyond its traditional boundaries. By combining analogue and digital processes, they merge historical craftsmanship with contemporary research. Their collaborative practice is rooted in shared intent, reflecting the dynamics of working partners and the possibilities that arise from mutual trust.
As solo artists Grant x Wilkes have exhibited extensively in public institutions, national art prizes, and private galleries throughout Australia. Collaboratively they have been finalists in the 2021 Milburn Art Prize for Landscape, and their portrait ‘Homecoming’ won both the Packer’s Prize and the Metro Arts Experimental Prize at the 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize. Their recent solo exhibition ‘Local Guide’ was exhibited at Loupe Creative Space in Brisbane.
Acknowledgements
Metro Arts’ 2026 program is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its funding and advisory body. Metro Arts is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and the Visual Art, Craft and Design Framework, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments.
This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Brisbane Portrait Prize.
Image credit: Courtesy of the artists.