WAYOUT ARTSPACE IS OPEN: THURSDAY-SUNDAY, 10AM - 2PM
Exhibition Opening Saturday 2 May 2026, 3-5pm
I Am Ned Kelly begins with absence. The instigating 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang (often cited as the world’s first feature film) survives only in fragmentary glimpses; its imagery remains incomplete and unstable. This exhibition engages with that loss as a documented historical condition and a generative space for renewal and reinterpretation.
Working across mark-making, performance, moving image, and installation, Robards reprocesses residual traces of the Kelly image through intertwined creative and technological processes, including AI-driven transformations, glitches, compression artefacts, and iterative re-rendering. These processes do not aim to restore the past; instead, they produce new interpretations. The exhibition becomes a space where image, system, interface, and audience collectively shape meaning.
Alongside these digital processes, the work embraces a material language of playful disruption. Marker, spray paint, and traced frames act as gestures of inscription and reinvention, echoing vandalism, graffiti, and acts of visual defiance aligned with Kelly’s enduring outlaw legacy. The iconic cultural symbol is repeatedly handled, interrupted, and re-authored.
Throughout the exhibition, Kelly’s helmet persists as a shifting visual anchor, continually reconstituted across surfaces and formats. Meaning emerges cumulatively through the viewer’s encounter, positioning both machine and audience as active participants in the ongoing remaking of a cultural icon. In this context, I Am Ned Kelly asks what happens to cultural icons in a digital environment, and how emerging technologies engage, transform, and continually reinterpret them.
Robards is a Mudgee-based video artist working across moving image, installation, and expanded cinematic practices. His work explores digital materiality, screen experience, and the transformation of images through contemporary technologies, including AI and compression-based processes.
He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, investigating new ontologies of the moving image through the convergence of image, apparatus, and audience. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals across Australia, spanning experimental film, installation, and hybrid digital–analogue processes.
