This exhibition is about origins. It is also about silences. And it is about the manifestation of beauty, tragedy, tenacity and creativity that moves through and directs the work of the artists. This movement circulates as life force – the spirit within – connecting the natural world of plants, animals, earth and sky to the social life of ritual, community and belonging. As close observers of their environment, the Indigenous artists featured here bear witness to seasonal rounds and their interplay among natural forces and human activity. From fierce floods to the cyclical seeding, fading and re-seeding of the flower world, regenerative possibilities appear. Through earth renewal and cultural retrieval, the center remains still. This is the quality of dadirri that circulates through the works featured here.
From the monumental floods of the mighty Daly River – a powerful artery meeting up with tributaries throughout the Northern Territory of Australia – to the North American Plains, where Colleen Cutschall situates her work, the parallel experiences of Aboriginal and Native American artists is not intended as a visual dialogue or forced conversation. Rather, the exhibition provides the space for an arrangement of shared silences suddenly bursting into story, each with a particular cultural and personal point of view. In these ways, the narratives of the paintings can be thought of as “decisive moments,” as Judith Lowry asks us to consider, each one bringing its own story to a visual moment.
Nineteenth and twentieth century displacements now seek a 21st century reckoning. The artists of the Merrepen Arts Centre bring place-based wisdom home by reconfiguring ‘place’ in their re-settled community, carrying ancestral knowledge forward to meet contemporary concerns. The Arts Centre itself serves as a cultural hub, linking artistic works to language and cultural regeneration. Inextricable from these is the collective response of the artists to serve as stewards of the land, a response that echoes in the call from Frank LaPena’s Earth Mother, to the cultural renewal work that is embedded in L. Frank’s visual stories, and Mario Martinez’s repeating motifs of Yaqui forms and abstractions. In these ways, the paintings themselves speak the quiet message of ‘the spirit within’ by becoming objects of contemplation. This is the request made of us by the artists – to meet in the space of artistic creation, in the joined experience of the gallery that is also their shared meeting ground.
Tressa Berman, Ph.D
Curatorial Consultant
