Dexter Rosengrave is a Boorloo-based artist whose practice is defined by relationship and return.

Working across image-making, curating, creative production, youth work, and Creative Arts Therapies, Dexter’s work circles attachment, desire, power, queer subjectivity, presence and absence, and the uncanny social lives of images.

Dexter graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania in 2018. Their practice has been recognised through the Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency in Paris, the ANZ & Sydney Mardi Gras Community Grant for Body as an Archive: Tracking the Transgender Experience in Tasmania, and the 2019 Midsumma & Australia Post Art Award for The After-Image. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, including Sydney Contemporary, Firstdraft, Cool Change Contemporary and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

They have also worked as a curator and creative producer across the Museum of Old and New Art and Dark Mofo, collaborating on exhibitions, installations and performances with artists including Marina Abramović, Mike Parr, Bill Viola, Cassils, United Visual Artists and Florentina Holzinger.

For the past few years, Dexter has been on what could generously be described as an extended detour into Creative Arts Therapies, where they are currently undertaking a Master's degree. Long before learning therapeutic language, their practice had already become a way of thinking, surviving and metabolising experience through a visual vernacular, holding a question without an answer. The detour simply offered another language for intuitions that had been circulating through the work for years.

Psychoanalytic and existential thought now travel alongside their practice, in conversation with philosophy, community, contemporary art, and knowing that much of this is twisted in the ancient. Their work lingers with images as companions, witnesses, mirrors, provocateurs, repositories of experience and, occasionally, kin. Poiesis, repetition and return continue to shape Dexter’s work and life, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through making, looking, living and looking again.