Art + Soul

28 Aug 2010-13 Jun 2011 ,

Exhibitions

First published on 28 Jun 2010. Updated on 14 Jun 2011.

This event has finished

The Art+Soul exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW is an exploration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artwork. What you might not realise is how significant this exhibition is.

It examines three themes - Home and Away, Dreams and Nightmares and Bitter and Sweet - but a larger theme is displaying the complexity of Indigenous art, from the desert to the inner city.

As artist Shen Shaomin says, we are the sum of our ancestors. History plays a big part in the exhibition - traditional bark painting, fish and eel traps, other Indigenous objects and techniques - but there is also innovation and modernity.

Take a work like ‘Mardayin' (2001) by John Mawurndjul, the nationally and internationally acclaimed artist leading bark painting in a whole new direction. The intricate detail of his crosshatching will dilate your pupils if you get in close. Meanwhile, Harry Wedge and Ginger Riley Munduwalawala are extravagant with colours that will take your eyes back to pinpricks, and self-proclaimed ‘shy photographer' Destiny Deacon presents her stories on race and identity. There are some works of outstanding beauty, especially Emily Kame Kngwarreye's desert flowers and Judy Watson's voile-like canvases.

Art+Soul is only part memoir, and perhaps more manifesto: art as a means to greater understanding and political change. The spiritual and imaginative world of the ancestors is evolving. The forever-petrified ancestor Buluwana, staring out of her bark painting, is locked in time - but this exhibition shows that Indigenous art is on the move.

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Words by Lorna Johnston