‘Batman & Robin’, is an upcoming exhibition at the Queensland Centre for Photography, showcases new large scale photographic works by Australian-artist Dean Butters.
Butters is a multi-disciplinary artist, working across photography, video and print-making. For this latest series of works he has used the tropes of Batman and Robin to examine ideas of protracted adolescence and social disconnection. The cyclical nature of the Batman and Robin relationship (and the essential replaceability of Robin) is used by 
Butters to examine the relationships he has developed with young women through his practice as an artist. Like Peter Pan this work is about being unstuck in a world that feels like it has aged and moved on around you.
Pop culture and appropriation are enduring themes throughout Butters’ work. Both are used to examine the influences of fiction on the creation and representation of the self. Fictional characters and appropriated imagery become deconstructive tools, that speak to both the universality of such imagery, while 
also questioning the freedom that they ultimately provide to our identities and self-definition.
“Through the tropes of Batman and Robin these portraits examine ideas of protracted adolescence and social disconnection. The work, as an exploration of self, looks at the relationships I develop with young women, and the repeating patterns that they form.
Who we are is fundamentally bound up in the fictions and stories that we consume, however, in seeking moments of weakness, isolation and 
self-destruction, these works ultimately talk about the failure of identity,” says Butters.
Butters is an emerging Australian artist, having graduated from the ANU School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2010. He has since exhibited extensively in Canberra, undertaken a residency with Canberra Contemporary Art Space and received grant funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Queensland Centre for Photography (QCP)
Until 16 February, 2014
Brisbane
Without Robin, 2012-2013
Because, 2013-2014
I Thought I Would Be More Than This, 2012-2013
It Always Seems To Lose Something In The Telling, 2013-2014
