STATION is pleased to present A Breath Before Dawn, Worimi artist Dean Cross' fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, open now until July 4.
Centred on In L ving Memory, a major two-channel moving image work commissioned by the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, the exhibition also includes Of Stone and Blood - a photographic series, alongside painted work by the artist.
In 2024 the National WWI Museum and Memorial launched its inaugural Artist-in-Residence program, naming Cross as its first recipient. The residency reflects the institution's commitment to preserving and sharing the stories of communities of colour, women and First Nations peoples who served in the First World War.
Commissioned for an international audience, In L ving Memory became for Cross a deeply personal response.
Drawing on his Worimi identity and his family's long history of military service, the moving image work shows the artist perform an improvised dance on Walbunja Country while dressed in military uniform, informed by what he describes as "blood memory": the genetic and spiritual inheritances passed down through generations.
Through stillness, repetition and restraint, Cross transforms the military uniform from a symbol of colonial authority into something intimate and unstable.
The application of ochre onto his skin reconnects the artist to Country while confronting the violence and contradictions embedded within Australia's colonial and military histories.
The work invites audiences to consider how past and present coalesce and what aspects of identity remain untold or perhaps unknowable.
Accompanying In L ving Memory is Of Stone and Blood, a photographic series created concurrently with the moving image work. These images capture moments of stillness and reflection, extending the emotional register of the performance and preserving its lingering trace as a quiet act of witnessing.
The stills were conceived to be presented as a group of five, circling the figure and capturing it from all angles, akin to viewing a memorial statue. This multiplicity of perspectives gestures toward the importance of considering complex histories and identities from many viewpoints and the empathy required to do so, particularly in relation to First Nations experience. Through this same formal logic, Cross sought to materialise the revolving dislocation of mixed-heritage First Nations identity.
Together, the works form a melancholic meditation on time, lineage and emotional memory.
Cross is the first man in his family not to enlist in military service, breaking a chain of duty that had endured for more than 145 years, a personal rupture that underpins the emotional force of the exhibition.
Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is a Worimi man through his paternal bloodline primarily working across installation, sculpture and painting.
Interested in the collisions of materials, ideas and histories, Cross is motivated by an understanding that his practice sits within a continuum of the oldest living culture on Earth - and enacts First Nations sovereignty through expanded contemporary art methodologies.
His cross-disciplinary practice often confronts the legacies of modernism, rebalancing dominant cultural and social histories.
Cross' work was exhibited in the Artist Room at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2025 and subsequently acquired. He was the winner of the First Nations Artist Prize, Gosford Art Prize, in 2025.
Recent significant group exhibitions include NEW SOUTH, Hazelhurst Arts Centre, curated by Sebastian Goldspink (2024); Octopus 23: THE FIELD, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, curated by Tamsin Hopkinson (2023); Free/State, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Sebastian Goldspink (2022); and Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, curated by Hannah Presley (2021).
In 2023, Cross presented Things That Are Real: Alvaro Barrington x Dean Cross, a major collaborative exhibition at Cement Fondu, Sydney.
Cross' work is held by major institutions including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
