Tony Albert Projecting our future 2002-13 (detail in progress), installation made of reworked objects, sculptures and paintings; original photographs, paintings and drawings and three unique artworks by Daniel Boyd, Dale Harding and TextaQueen, dimensions variable, approx 280 × 1200 cm, private collection, New Zealand © the artist.
The AGNSW contemporary project space features an ongoing series of exhibitions of new work by living artists. This key program enables artists working in Australia and internationally to create work on a significant scale. Since 1989 more than 100 projects have engaged audiences with the most current ideas and material developments in contemporary culture.
For his first solo exhibition at the AGNSW, artist Tony Albert presents his installation called Projecting our future. Tony Albert’s practice interrogates the contemporary legacies of colonial oppression from an Indigenous Australian perspective. Projecting the future continues his process of integrating re-worked ‘Aboriginalia’ objects, that is, kitsch objects from the 20th century that naively depict Australian Aboriginal people (ashtrays, spoons, small mirrors, salt shakers, etc.), which Tony Albert has been collecting for many years.
These items used to be/still are in some Australian households as everyday objects or “souvenirs”.
As an anecdote, when IDAIA’s curatorial team first went to observe Tony Albert’s exhibition, a visitor exclaimed that his family had precisely the same platter at home that the one exhibited (see photo of the platter with the painted quote “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” in the photo gallery related to this exhibition).
By gathering all these objects and reworking them with painted and graphic elements, Tony Albert has created a complex and expansive wall installation, questioning of the uniformity of Aboriginalia and implied stereotypes.
When asked about the shape of his installation, Albert says: “Interestingly enough, the shape is an element of the work that I have specifically chosen keep secret. I knew I wanted to use that shape but it lead to so many ideas and interpretations that I thought it may be best to leave the shape to the viewers imagination. The way the centre image ripples out suggests vibrations coming out of a speaker or the idea of a ripple effect. Is it the shape of and eye, the outline of a UFO suggestive of repeated alien iconography or of flight like the boomerangs and butterflies that lift out of the shape.”(1)
Projecting our future is the final part in a major trilogy, the work considers cultural difference in relation to pride, optimism and solidarity. Albert’s work mixes the personal and political, with visual connections based on either his own individual artist experience or gleaned from a collective whole. This interconnectivity is continued with the appearance of text within/on the work, with quotes from films, religion, politics, history and pop music.
As an example, the quote “After a cyclone comes a rainbow” (written on one of his drawings) clearly refers to cyclone Tracy that destroyed Darwin in 1974, and the spiritual ancestor Rainbow Serpent, however it is a quote from a song of pop star Katy Perry.
A recurring element appearing in Albert’s installation is the target used in his latest series entitled Brothers 2013. In this series of portraits we can see the artist’s own representation; Tony Albert poses for the camera with his studio assistant and 18 Kirinari teenagers, all with target signs stenciled on their chests. The photographs implicitly refer to the 2012 police shooting in King Cross of two Aboriginal teenager boys. The imagery of a target is used as a symbol of cultural participation and political resistance. This artwork is Albert’s project for the future, a vision that a time seems stalled but which is ever optimistic.
(1) As interviewed by IDAIA’s Director, Solenne Ducos-Lamotte