Asher Milgate - The sun is my religion 1 - 18 July 2026
Asher Milgate
The sun is my religion
1 - 18 July 2026
Exhibition opening with the Artist
to be launched by
Katherine Roberts
Senior Curator
Manly Art Gallery
Saturday 4 July 2026
2.30 - 4.30 pm
Asher Milgate & Miguel Olmo
Artists in Conversation
with
Matt Cox
Senior Curator and Artist Liaison
Tilt Industrial Design
and
Former Curator
Asian Art Gallery of NSW
Saturday 18 July 2026
2.30 - 4.30 pm
Asher Milgate's photographic practice operates as an embodied inquiry into landscape, memory and post-colonial legacy.
His approach is shaped by four decades of relationship with the Wiradjuri community in Wellington, New South Wales. As an artist of Anglo-Celtic heritage, Milgate carries the weight of inherited colonial narratives with grandparents involved in the Aborigines Inland Mission in 1940's and his work reflects a quiet insistence on listening, accountability and long-term cultural engagement. Each print in the sun is my religion is handmade - torn, exposed, sewn and reassembled. The fibre-based silver gelatin paper holds not just an image, but memory made material, where silver and salt, shadow and stitch conspire to form something both fragile and certain. These works become propositions rather than documents, holding tension between rupture and repair, testimony and Silence, personal memory and collective history.
Materiality sits at the core. The matte paper evokes skin more than surface, a site of touch, trauma and care. Each stitch is both mark and act, acknowledging matrilineal labour, industrial repetition and the photographic medium's role in shaping how histories are recorded, circulated and reimagined.
From a distance, the compositions echo fractured aerial surveys - visual traces of land management and inherited systems of separation. This is deliberate. Through spatial metaphor and visual language, Milgate invites us to reconsider how land is perceived and whose stories are prioritised in that act of seeing.
While the exhibition draws its title from a quote by Hans Heysen, the work speaks to a wider lineage of artists who have reimagine Australia and the landscape. Heysen's reverence for light and gum trees provided Milgate's early entry point, visceral and cultural alignment that offered a way in. David Hockney's composite photography expanded his sense of how landscapes might be constructed. Andy Warhol's stitched prints. Blak Douglas's political commentary underscores the power of visual art to confront settler narratives and center First Nations sovereignty.
Milgate's practice moves beyond homage. It offers a grounded, personal lens shaped by lived responsibility, research and relationship.
In this space, photography becomes a practice of witness, one that invites reflection and response.