“Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors”
Where: The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW
When: Through Dec. 6
Info: Free; 202-885-1300; american.edu/cas/katzen/museum
Barely more than four decades have passed since Australia amended its constitution to include its native Aboriginal population in the census and recognize them as citizens. The referendum passed in 1967 with more than 90 percent of the vote.
Two years ago, Brenda Croft, a lecturer at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, commemorated the 40th anniversary of the referendum by organizing an exhibit of artwork by creators of Aboriginal extraction. The show traveled to three Australian cities, and has now taken up temporary residence at American University’s Katzen Museum — its only international venue.
Of 30 indigenous artists whose works are featured, 23 were born before 1967, and thus were personally affected by the constitutional change, as was Croft herself. Her father was taken from his community when he was a baby, and wasn’t reunited with his birth mother until he was almost 50 years old.
Croft’s aim in organizing the show was to emphasize that Aboriginal art is not of merely historical interest.
“For such a long time, indigenous visual culture was not considered in an art context,” Croft said. “It was considered in an ethnographical or historical context. It’s only been a for a few decades, really, that the work has been considered as art.”
The pieces Croft has chosen are appropriately varied, ranging from traditional possum-skin burial cloaks to surreal installations that would look right at home at the Hirshhorn Museum.
In the latter category is Danie Mellor’s “Contrivance of a Vintage Wonderland.” The original mixed-media installation was too big to travel, so he created a scaled-down touring version of the piece that stands as a highlight of the show’s U.S. version.
“It’s the museum diorama we wished we could have seen, when we visited natural history museums when we were young,” Croft said. The piece includes fiberglass kangaroo figures adorned with macropod paws and ears, and covered in mosaiclike patterns of crockery. The piece is unmistakably contemporary, but it references Aboriginal folk art, too.
Treahna Hamm’s woven figure “Yabby” occupies the exhibit’s more traditional end. Hamm employs a style of sedge grass-weaving once used in South Australian river communities to make baskets and fish traps. By appropriating this method to create a sculptural, rather than a practical object, Hamm comments on her connection to her heritage as well as on the ecological damage to the rivers systems in which the sedge grass grows.
Another piece that stands out is Christopher Pease’s “Target.” Pease takes a scene derived from an 1833 lithograph of indigenous people interacting with French explorers, overlaying three red concentric circles. It evokes Jasper Johns’ “Target” paintings, but the intimation of a gunsight is unmistakable. Pease is commenting on a clash of cultures wherein the meaning of concentric circles can be one of good fortune or of danger and violence, says Croft.
“The exchange between the two cultures [depicted in the original lithograph] is not one of conflict, but of reciprocity,” she noted. Of course, that would quickly change, as European settlers forced Aboriginal people from their homelands, sometimes at gunpoint. Whether the red concentric circles represent a threatening image or not depends entirely on the set of associations you bring with you.
