Cairns Indigenous Art Fair
Posted: 05 Jan 2012 | By: Jeremy Eccles
"Something serious needed to happen - the last Indigenous frontier was opening up." And perennial consultant Jonah Jones was just the man to make the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) happen to try to bring to the world's attention the burgeoning art of Torres Strait Islander and Cape York Indigenous artists. His career had encompassed both establishing the Araluen Art Centre at the heart of Desert art in Alice Springs in 1984 and setting up the commercially successful Melbourne Art Fair.
His serious challenge was to justify a ‘boutique art fair' showing only Queensland art when most such fairs are multinational. "And this wasn't even national," Jones pointed out. But as part of the state government's $25 million, eight-year backing Indigenous Arts program designed to increase the sustainability of arts practice in Far North Queensland through new art centres - now fourteen - and three new hubs, the need to find markets for that art was paramount.
Key factors involved in the flowering of this last frontier were printmaking classes at the Cairns TAFE, which in 1990 found such innate Island carvers as Dennis Nona and Alick Tipoti ready and willing to share their stories ever more creatively; then the Queensland Art Gallery brought Cape York's Story Place to Brisbane in 2003, firing up Aboriginal art on the mainland.
Two years after the first CIAF, the third fair continues to build on Jones's model. Most significantly, it now has an Indigenous director in the person of Avril Quaill - proudest when showing off the works of "my Mob", the Quandamooka artists from North Stradbroke Island. Quaill was addressing a group of invited collectors and curators which included galleries from London and New Zealand, Australian regional art gallery directors and the head of the American Federation of Arts, which is currently touring Brisbane's Richard Bell around university galleries in the states. This VIP program was initiated by Jones last year, and though sales are not as important in his eyes as finding new markets for the art, he claims his people made the difference between CIAF's 2009 sales of $1–2 million and 2010's $732,000.
Avril Quaill has a number of agendas. She accepts the commercial reality that getting museums and commercial galleries to take art from CIAF adds value in the eyes of potential buyers. She also has to balance the extremes of Queensland art that want to be part of the fair ... from the intensely connected narrative art of the Torres Strait and the more-recently desanctified paintings and artefacts from the Cape to the provocative Blak works of city wallahs proppaNOW (an Aboriginal artists cooperative), via T-towels, woomeras and some simply gorgeous material works that retired fashionista Linda Jackson helped to create in Mossman Gorge.
Harmonising the dissonant was achieved by geography. CIAF moved this year from The Tanks in the Botanic Gardens to the waterfront Cruise Terminal. This puts art centres and commercial galleries that were previously separated in the same space, which works melodiously. Quaill herself then curated a ‘fine art' exhibition of remote work at the Regional Gallery, giving it the ‘value' she referred to above. Further apart still were both the over-the-top emanations of proppaNOW in a coyly entitled show and the gripping debut of Alick Tipoti's Sorcerers' Masks at Canopy Artspace, requiring a ritual danced blessing which he'd choreographed himself. Cairns is definitely more than a tourist town in August.
Images from top:
Brian Robinson, Cast net, Waiben wharf, 2011, linocut, 80 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Djumbunji Press.
Roy McIvor, Dynamic order #5, 2011, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 120 x 120cm. Courtesy the artist and Vivien Anderson Gallery.
