proppaNOW

Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Bianca Beeston, Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey, Laurie Nilsen

10 December 2010 - 12 February 2011 | CCAS Gorman

Let's get this 'Urban' moniker out of the way up front. It's 26 years since the exhibition "Koori Art '84" introduced contemporary political Aboriginal art to Sydney. That extraordinary exhibition was generally misunderstood as "simulated [and] derived" and largely unreviewed except as a ‘passing fad’. Non-Aboriginal art followers appended the word 'urban' to this ‘passing fad' in an effort to distinguish it from Western Desert and Arnhem Land art. Enough already. It's yesterday's label.

Today we're talking proppaNOW. We're talking contemporary art: white hot art that interrogates both past and present. Art that brands the canvas, brands the object, brands the brain. Art packed with visual gags, puns and a wildly intelligent re-use of language that collapses platitudes and spits out old and contemporary pain; art devoid of pseudo-cultural baggage that makes it a 'white thing'. Art that makes you squirm, if you're game enough to play the looking, thinking game.

All have individual established practices, working across painting, sculpture, photo-media, video, assemblage, drawing and mixed media. They are overtly political, erudite, highly informed and absolutely compelling. They share common intentions: to agitate, to challenge, to confront; to uncover and overthrow stereotypes, lies, misconceptions and myths; to redefine the rules, in their own terms, about contemporary Aboriginal life and contemporary Aboriginal art. They use humour, passion, aggression; they satirise and subvert. They never compromise: they refuse to be censored.

They re proppaNOW. They're changing the world.

(Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak, November 2010)

Image: Tony Albert, No Place Warrior, 2009, watercolour on archers paper