Word: artistically
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...Greeting the viewers as they enter the building are the large-scale photos of Michael Riley. The late Dubbo-born artist and filmmaker recalled growing up in central New South Wales, "lying down in the front yard looking up at telegraph poles and lines? cutting through the clouds." Made four years before his death, his final photo series cloud (2000) recaptures that view, though what float across the sky are poetic symbols of Aboriginal dispossession: European farm animals and vestiges of Christianity; even the boomerang returns to him as a weapon of racial stereotyping, beautiful but deadly. Riley...
...Judy Watson was another. And around to the left of cloud will be the artist's 11-m-long glass ceiling, inspired by her painting two halves with bailer shell, 2002, in the NGA collection. Floating in a glassy sea of Prussian and ultramarine blue, the sand-blasted image is deceptively beautiful: the Aboriginal bailer shell was drawn from a collection at the British Museum where a friend of Watson's was working last decade, and her work is about the sometimes painful process of cultural retrieval. Watson, 46, who traces her lineage to the Waanyi country of northwest Queensland...
...Indeed, squashing the usual perceptions about Aboriginal art has been the life mission of Croft and Perkins, senior curators at the NGA and Art Gallery of N.S.W. respectively. As founding members of Sydney's Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in 1987, they mixed art with activism (Perkins is the daughter of famed campaigner Charles; Croft is a widely exhibited artist), pushing the envelope with indigenous shows. For the exhibition "fluent" at the 1997 Venice Biennale, they positioned Aboriginal work at the forefront of contemporary art, mixing Murray River eel traps with Western Desert landscapes and more urban visions. "What was achieved...
...also continues a French fascination with Australia's indigenous culture that began when Napoleon sent scientific voyages to the South Pacific. Napoleon's artists were the first to document Tasmania's Aborigines as individuals rather than types, even recording their songs and dance. "It's a tradition that's been rich and sustained over a long period of time," says Susan Hunt, curator of the 1999 show "Terre Napol?on: Australia Through French Eyes." "So this hasn't just come from nowhere." Indeed, during the 1950s, Paris-based artist Karel Kupka was the first to collect Arnhem Land barks as pieces...
...marble (ca. 3,000 B.C.) and Constantin Brancusi's stylized bronze Sleeping Muse (1910), pictured, the exhibit, which runs through Sept. 4, invites visitors to consider the head as the birthplace of thought, emotion and identity. Dominating the exhibit foyer is a giant sculpture, Cosmos (2001), by contemporary French artist Boris Achour. Made of dyed resin, the cartoonish noggin with protruding nose rotates in space while humming a Brazilian lambada; the sound evokes an artist contentedly at work and fills the lively, labyrinthine exhibit with creative energy. Other artists prefer to turn their heads, well, on their heads. S?bastien Leclerc...