Artroom5

Posted: 27 Jan 2012  |  By: Stephanie Radok

Coinciding with the 2012 Adelaide Festival of Arts (2–18 March 2012), artroom5, the gallery in a home, curated by Vivonne Thwaites, presents the work of four artists, each of whom is tracking an individual path linked to Australian history with particular attention to mingled Aboriginal and White stories. Each artist spends a lot of time researching and then makes works opening up hidden or unknown stories.

This is an area in which Thwaites has long been interested. She is currently engaged in a project that will come to fruition in June 2012 at Flinders University Art Museum that looks at the work of White artists who have worked in remote Aboriginal communities.

Sue Kneebone draws on her past family history from the pastoral frontier in the Gawler Ranges of South Australia. Her emphasis is on ecological and environmental stories involving animals and the land as well as human ones. She uses bricolage and photomontage to knit the past into jarring configurations that reveal new angles of interpretation.

The work of Julie Gough of the Trawlwoolway people of Tasmania has been trawling the history of Tasmania for some time finding many stories to re-imagine and re-view. She has a fascinating piece in the new Aboriginal Cultures Galleries at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra called The Chase. This work consists of a very old and worn chaise lounge whose legs she has replaced with charred tea tree sticks like spears and into the padding of which an account from colonial times of an ambiguous encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is written with shiny steel pins.

The handicraft aspects of Kneebone and Gough’s work are more explicit in the Queer Art of Troy-Anthony Baylis, a descendant of the Jawoyn people of the Northern Territory as well as having an Irish background. He is reclaiming and inventing an Aboriginal Queer history one stitch at a time through text, photography, performance, Glomesh recycling and knitting. In his PhD research he is examining ‘drag’ in his character Kaboobie and ‘Perm-a-culture: An Indigenous and Queer Research Methodological Framework’. His new works, quasi-beanies, giant condoms or what you will are knitted and include text. He photographed them outdoors on a recent trip to New Zealand in imitation of fashion shoots that link fashion with remote places.

Therese Ritchie has been working in the Northern Territory for thirty years and was the subject of a recent joint retrospective with Chips Mackinolty called Not Dead Yet, curated by Anita Angel at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery. Ritchie is a graphic designer, photographer and artist who makes biting work about living in the Northern Territory. Her recent work for this exhibition is photographs taken in Alice Springs showing what she calls a “paradise of sadness” and “a heart of darkness of our own making”.

Troy-Anthony Baylis, Julie Gough, Sue Kneebone, Therese Ritchie
Artroom5
Henley Beach, South Australia
29 February–18 March 2012

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