Urban Walkabout

URBAN WALKABOUT PRESENTED BY COOEE ART GALLERY

22 SEPTEMBER 2018

Exhibition Details Urban Walkabout to be opened by John Wakefield Major of Waverley, Saturday 22nd September 2018 11:00am at Cooee Art Gallery Bondi.

Proceedings follow: 11:00am | Alien[N]ation – Cooee Art Bondi 31 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi (until 3rd November 2018) 12:30pm | Seaweed Mob - Gadigal Mural – Sea Wall Bondi Beach Sea Wall Bondi Beach

(permanent installation)

1:30pm

| Blak Douglas - How Fast Are You Going Now? – Cooee Art Paddington 326 Oxford Street, Paddington (until 13th October 2018)

Cover (front & back) Image Blak Douglas Sea Wall [detail], 2018 Synthetic Polymer on Concrete 150 x 180 cm Inner Front Cover Image Jacob Karumapuli Stengle Warburton, 2018 Oil on Canvas 91 x 121 cm #16640 Inner Back Cover Image Ian Waldron The Gulf (Harpers Flour)[detail], 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard 72 x 59 cm #16796 Overleaf Image Helen S. Tiernan As Above So Below (Triptych)[detail], 2018 Oil and Paper on Canvas 180 x 180 cm #16758

Alien{N}ation Adrian Newstead OAM

Founding Director, Cooee Art Galler y

An urban Aboriginal art survey drawing on works from the Cooee Art Gallery archive and incorporating new works by artists currently represented by the gallery.

Since the genesis of the Urban Aboriginal art movement in the 1960s, dispossession and alienation have been a common thread. Indigenous art is generally considered ‘Contemporary’ and the term ‘Urban’ has been applied to Aboriginal art created in the modernist Western style.

Whether the artists have been selftaught or schooled, marginalised or indoctrinated within the mainstream, their art often deals with social and cultural issues such as the stolen generation, land rights, and reconciliation as they question identity and challenge the colonial accounts of Australian history.

Amongst the earliest Urban artists were Kevin Gilbert and Gordon Syron, both of whom began creating art in

Gordon Syron Bury the Living, 1993 Lithograph, ed. 2/30 58 x 76 cm #137

Kevin Gilbert My Father’s Studio, 1992 Lithograph, ed. 27/50 printed image 28.2 x 35.4 cm sheet 38.1 x 56.2 cm

jail during the 1970s. Gilbert used a sharpened teaspoon to carve an image of his father’s tribal mind into linoleum on the floor of his prison cell. Gordon Syron began painting images of loss and separation through the view from his cell window. Other contemporaries were amongst the first Indigenous people to attend art schools. Harold Thomas studied at the South Australia School of Art and designed the Aboriginal flag a year - after graduation.

At the same time, Trevor Nickolls learnt to paint at the Victorian College of The Arts. By the 1980s Nickolls’ Dreamtime Machine Time images had struck a visceral chord in art circles. His paintings explored the nature of the conflict caused by humanity trapped in an isolated and industrialised society, as

well as his concern for the degradation of the land and the environment under white occupation. When I first met Nickolls in a makeshift studio at the seedy end of Manly beach in the early 1980s, he seemed to personify the struggle Urban Aboriginal artists faced in striving to externalise and resolve contradictions between formal art style and inner emotional imagery.

I opened Cooee Art Gallery (then the Cooee Emporium) in 1981 as urban art began to coalesce into an exciting movement. In 1984 Cooee’s curator, Chris Watson, worked on Koori Art ’84, an exhibition that was held at Contemporary Art Space in Sydney.

This exhibition, and the advent of the Boomalli Urban Artist Cooperative

Trevor Nickolls Full Moon, 2017 Synthetic Polymer Paint on Belgian Linen 91 x 91 cm #16760

later that year, provided a focus for the movement. Artists who had formerly worked in isolation began exploring common links and public art institutions began to take interest. Urban artists travelled out to remote Aboriginal communities and were exposed to traditional people and their way of life. Lin Onus, Arone Raymond Meeks, Fiona Foley, Judy Watson and Avril Quail were amongst the many to establish connections with stories written in the land this way.

Influenced by civil rights political posters and graphic art, artists and emerging publishers such as myself, accessed print studios like the Tin Sheds and Redback Graphics in Sydney and Canberra’s Studio One. Once again Chris Watson

played a vital role when she co-curated the seminal exhibition and catalogue Aboriginal Views in Print and Poster with urban artist Jeffrey Samuels.

Boomali artist Arone Raymond Meeks moved to Paris after winning an Australia Council artist-in-residency. In 1989 a Special Operations Squad officer killed a young Aboriginal activist named David Gundy after bursting into his room with a shotgun. Meeks responded with the print Shot in the Dark, in which Gundy’s spirit is guided by an Eiffel Tower-like beacon. The Aboriginal flag sits abstracted at its base. Hanging boomerangs and bullet holes make an oblique reference to black death’s in custody.

Karen Casey Cocktail Party, 1990 Screenprint 40 x 55 cm #2266

Donna Leslie Imprisoned Spirit, 1990 Lithograph 70 x 49 cm #302

In Victoria, the contemporary painting movement was spearheaded by Lin Onus. Inspired by his travels to Arnhem Land and with permission from the traditional custodians who had adopted him as a ‘son’, he included traditional rarrk (crosshatching) in his paintings. His finest works were commentaries on the environment and the inability of Westerners to access the spiritual presence latent in the land.

In South Australia Ngarrindjeri artist Ian Abdulla, who grew up in an early irrigation settlement in the Riverland, made a strong impression through colourful, pictorial works rendered in a naive style. He personalised the landscape, depicting his youthful activities on the Murray River by juxtaposing text and image above a flattened foreground.

Cooee exhibited artworks by these

artists alongside contemporaries that included Donna Leslie, Karen Casey, Ellen Jose, Trehana Hamm and a host of others throughout the 1980s.

One artist whose acerbic tonguein-cheek humour caught our early interest was Richard Bell. We exhibited his Better Off... series in the lead up to the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988. Bell’s politically pointed works employed a language of dispossession aimed primarily at empowering his own people, rather than titillating a white art audience. Twenty years later he wrote Bell’s Theorem - Aboriginal art it’s a White Thing, excoriating nonIndigenous art professionals and the burgeoning market for traditional Aboriginal painting.

Helen S. Tiernan As Above So Below (Triptych), 2018 Oil and Paper on Canvas 180 x 180 cm #16758

Ian Waldron Carpentaria (Seven Horsemen), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard, ed. 1/9 55 x 79 cm #16790

Ian Waldron Carpentaria (Brumby), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard, ed. 1/9 55 x 79 cm #16789

Ian Waldron Carpentaria (Yattamenn), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard, ed. 1/9 55 x 79 cm #16793

Ian Waldron Carpentaria (Uncle Sandy), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard, ed. 55/79 55 x 79 cm #16792

Laurie Nilsen Untitled, 2010 Mixed Media on Timber 90 x 52 x 15 cm #16791

As Australians celebrated the Bicentennial of colonisation, Gordon Bennett employed images of the tall ships that sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1788 to comment on Australian colonial identity, in much the same way that the father of urban art, Gordon Syron, repeated images of the tall ships entering Sydney Harbour time and time again in paintings entitled Invasion Day. More than 30 years later, images such as these have entered the collective unconscious, while these founding urban artists have been followed by dozens of others. Christian Thompson, Brook Andrew, Jonathon Jones, Daniel Boyd, Christopher Peece and many others have carried on as urban Aboriginal art has become a tradition in its own right.

Included in this exhibition are four

artists who are currently represented, though not exclusively, by Cooee Art Gallery: Helen S. Tiernan, Blak Douglas, Jacob Stengle and Ian Waldron. In Tiernan’s textured works, feminised backgrounds underlie historic first contact imagery. They are a poignant reminder of the way in which Europeans romanticised the landscape while appropriating the sites and imagery of those they colonised in the antipodes.

Ian Waldron’s Carpentaria series shows Aboriginal stockmen engaging in enterprise on their own terms, while seductive vintage advertising images for tea, flour, and sugar belie the fact that these were at one time laced with poison to dispossess Aboriginal people of their land. Jacob Stengle, brought up in an orphanage after being stolen

Ian Waldron The Gulf (Billy Tea), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard 72 x 59 cm #16794

Ian Waldron The Gulf (Harpers Flour), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard 72 x 59 cm #16796

Ian Waldron The Gulf (CSR Sugar), 2017 Archival Ink on Aluboard 72 x 59 cm #16795

Ian Abdulla Looking for Bottles Synthetic Polymer Paint on Canvas 152 x 90.5 cm #16787

Helen S. Tiernan We are Stronger When We are Together Oil on Canvas 169 x 110 cm #16759

from his family in the 1960s, harks back to the children of his youth, and the fantasy world into which they retreated.

Concurrent with this exhibition, Blak Douglas has created a mural on the sea wall at Bondi Beach. Seaweed Mob (2018), a major work commissioned

by Cooee Art Gallery, pays homage to the original inhabitants of Sydney’s south coast, the Gadigal. Having sourced what is reputed to be the only known photograph of a ceremony taking place on the southern end of the beach, he incorporated it into a panoramic photograph taken on his iPhone 5S+ when the beach was completely covered in seaweed. The image has been further enhanced using local rock carving imagery, stylised hand & foot prints and a ‘you are here’ map on left

hand edge which traces the coastline like a ‘bloodline’.

I have derived a great deal of pleasure revisiting the past and sourcing new works while curating this show. I do hope you enjoy it.

Richard Bell We’re Not (Dutch) Natural Earth Pigments on Canvas 30 x 23 cm #1964

Jacob Karumapuli Stengle Warburton, 2018 Oil on Canvas 91 x 121 cm #16640

Blak Douglas Instant Paint Removal, 2016 Synthetic Polymer Paint on Canvas 91 x 61 cm #15150

Sea Mob Blak Douglas

Visual and Performing Artist

This piece was always intended to pay homage to the original inhabitants of Bondi Beach, the Gadigal. Having sourced what is reputed as the ‘only known photograph of a ceremony’ taking place on the Southern end of the beach, I set to task to incorporate the group. I’d taken a panorama photograph on my i phone 5S+ some three years earlier when the beach was completely covered in seaweed. This added to its mystique re the definition of ‘Booindi’ (Bondi) as many say this translates to either ‘place of crashing waves’ or place of ‘odorous smell’ (decaying seaweed).

The image has been further enhanced using motifs including local rock carving imagery as well as stylised hand & foot prints across the beachfront. Adding a ‘you are here’ map on left hand edge and tracing the coastline across the base as a graphic element becomes metaphoric - as a ‘bloodline’. Finally the blurb at left is referenced from the 2001 text ‘Aboriginal Sydney’ by Melinda Hinkson & Alana Harris.

Blak Douglas Sea Mob, 2018 Digital Print on Canvas on Concrete 2 x 10 m

How Fast Are You Going Now? Blak Douglas

Visual and Performing Artist In this suite of paintings, there’s I revisit one of my formative exhibitions when I first arrived in Sydney - a landmark show titled - A Sign of the Crimes. In that exhibition I restyled generic road signs we are all too familiar with, and gave them a satirical makeover.

In this exhibition we see several pieces of a similar vein. Take for example ‘How fast are you going now?’. This piece came to mind when recently driving through a National Park in Western Sydney.

As we drove down a dirt track in the middle of the bush, my dear friend who accomapanied me commented “That’s hilarious, you should paint that”.

So with a twist, here we see a fictitious version. ‘230’ - the total years of Colonial occupation on Aboriginal Country. Given the amount of country highways I see, there are stretches where speed limits could definitely increase. In this piece, despite the ‘speed’ being 230, we are continually constrained and henceforth dealt the wrath of the law if disobeyed.

The metaphor I see here is reflected in the Colonial law under which Aboriginal peoples have been forced to live. (As a developing ‘Nation’) WE ARE KEPT AT A PACE THAT IS GOVERNED BY A GROUP OF PRIVILEGED WHITE MEN IN ORDER TO PREVENT OUR WORLDLY EGALITARIAN ADVANCEMENT.

Blak Douglas How Fast Are You Going Now?, 2018 Synthetic Polymer Paint on Canvas 120 x 200 cm

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