Word: prism
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Where recent international surveys have placed indigenous artists at the margins of Australian life (three years ago, Berlin's "Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia" included only one), visitors to "Prism" could be forgiven for thinking that Aboriginal art now occupies the center. Here, prominent non-Aboriginal artists such as Piccinini, Rosemary Laing and Fiona Hall, for once, become the minority. But because of the quietly considered way the pictures are hung, the Aboriginal upstaging appears neither jarring nor odd but perfectly natural. In this way it reflects both the heightened interest in Aboriginal art internationally, and its growing impact...
...Prism," it's unmissable-from Brook Andrew's eye-grabbing Sexy and Dangerous, 1997, in which the colonial gaze behind an archival photo is wittily subverted by digital manipulation, to the late Rover Thomas' powerful Paruku (Lake Gregory), 1991, which draws the eye down Bridgestone's central corridor with the cosmic pull of a black hole. In a salon-style gallery designed for the appreciation of modern masters, the aesthetic relationship between Aboriginal painting and 20th century abstraction has never seemed closer. Though as Thomas, the former stockman from Turkey Creek, reportedly said of Rothko, "Who's that bugger that...
Exhibition organizer Nakayama calls the Western Desert painting movement "a very evolutionary contemporary art," and "Prism" offers some of its key turning points-from a board of the early phase at Papunya, when European materials were first introduced to the desert community in 1971, to Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Man's Love Story, 1978, the first dot painting to be bought by a public art gallery. But where the exhibition breaks new ground is in exploring the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous art. In a room to the right of Love Story, the Australian art divide is made spurious...
Cross-pollination is at the heart of Adelaide-based Fiona Hall's work, and her botanical passions have often brought her in close proximity to Aboriginal Australia. This is cleverly suggested in "Prism" by placing her cabinet of glass-beaded native flora and fauna, Understorey, 1999-2004, in the anteroom to a gallery of work by mainly women artists from the Central Australian settlement of Utopia, whose riotous desert-flower colorfields appear to wink at Hall's work...
Making amends is the central room of "Prism." Here Warlpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi's black-and-white paintings of salt plains, glittering like dark crystals, peacefully cohabit with Iranian-born Hossein Valamanesh's Fallen Branch, 2005. With the latter, the Adelaide-based sculptor has fashioned a circular, ceaselessly interconnecting series of bronze twigs that could well stand as a symbol for this subtly shape-shifting show. By redefining the perspective of Australian art, "Prism" shows that its indigenous and non-indigenous branches spring from the same growing tree...