AustLit

Ryan Presley was born in 1987 in Alice Springs. He currently lives and works in Brisbane. His art practice is a reflection of his locale which he audits and critiques to mount a larger inquiry that interrogates the articulations of power.

Moving through a variety of artistic mediums and expressions his approach could often be described as ‘post-disciplinary’. This frequently results in using different visual tools appropriate for the execution of a particular body of work. Previously these have included printmaking, oil painting, sculpture and new media with drawing and draughtsmanship used as the cornerstone to these methods.

Presley’s work has been acquired by the Queensland University Museum of Art and Murdoch University’s art collections. He is currently completing a PhD at the Queensland College of Art.

Source: Ryan Presley

Ryan Presley has designed a three-dimensional work using the word DEBT, reflecting on his re-interpretation of $10, $20, $50 and $100 notes (works on paper currently held in the UQ Art Museum collection).

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Listen to Ryan Presley discuss his works here: IMA Talks

Full Biography in AustLit: Ryan Presley

Image Credit: Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

Archie Moore (born Toowoomba 1970, lives Brisbane) works across media in portrayals of self and divulged national histories. He questions key signifiers of identity – skin, language, smell, food, dwelling, politics, religion, flags – and points to errors in foundational intercultural knowledge, asking what are the outcomes of misinformation. His practice is embedded in Aboriginal politics and the wider concerns of racism. Uncertainty is a recurrent theme pertaining to his paternal Kamilaroi heritage.

He completed his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1998. In 2001, he was awarded the Millennial Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship which enabled him to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

In 2010, Moore was the winner of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. He has six times been shortlisted for the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013). In 2013, he was commissioned by Newcastle Region Art Gallery to create the sculpture, General Sanders vs Colonel Saunders; Also in 2013 he was invited to participate in the University of Queensland's National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize. His work for this exhibition, Black Dog, was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Moore was one of fourteen artists shortlisted for the prestigious 2015 Western Australian Indigenous Art Award at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Sources: Archie Moore

The Commercial Gallery

In 14 Nations, Archie Moore offers a series of original flags, connecting one side of the Great Court to the other and initiating a visual dialogue with the Australian, Queensland, UQ, Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal flags on the Forgan Smith tower.

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Full Biography on AustLit: Archie Moore

Image Credit: Courting Blakness

Karla is Wiradjuri, her parents are from Mascot, Sydney. Karla Dickens was born in Sydney in 1967; the Year of the Referendum, that gave Aboriginal people human status within the nation called Australia. A double dawn for Aboriginal people; a major national political and social shift, and an innocent new born seemingly as yet without any connection to her history and Aboriginal heritage. As she tells, the process of moving from childhood to the present was a colourful and, at times, destructive journey of self discovery. Ironically and literally a truly dark but noble ‘Dickensian’ life. In the 1970s feminists spoke of being three times discriminated against – being Aboriginal, being a woman, and being gay. Karla’s Aboriginality and sexuality do profoundly inform her work – yet her insight and breadth of artistic practice both embraces the notion of identity politics deeply and yet works with universal human experiences. Her work truly fosters an intra and cross cultural dialogue through the forum of contemporary art.

Source:Karla Dickens

Karla Dickens’ multimedia work, The Honey and the Bunny, offers a humorous meditation on sexuality, sport and urban Indigenous space.

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Full Biography on AustLit: Karla Dickens

Image Credit: MAMA: Murray Art Museum, Albury

r e a, an artist of the Gamilaraay people of northern New South Wales, works with photography, digital media and moving images, exploring creative environments through installation. She initially studied Electrical Trades at Petersham TAFE, Sydney in 1989, and then completed a Visual Arts Diploma at the EORA Centre at Petersham TAFE in 1990. She subsequently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 1993. In subsequent years, r e a has completed a Masters of Visual Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra, and a Masters of Science, Digital Imaging and Design, (CADA), New York University, New York. r e a is a doctoral candidate in Visual Anthropology at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, where she is investigating the ‘body activist’. r e a’s ongoing practice takes its development from new and critical discourses that are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in approach, she explores the convergence between art and technology, philosophy & history; Aboriginality & culture(s), identity, body & Queer politics.

Full Biography on AustLit: r e a

'Poles Apart comprises a silent, high definition video, four photographic triptychs, and a Victorian morning/mourning gown created collaboratively with Melbourne dress designer Amanda Fairbanks. In the video the protagonist, an apparently ageless, androgynous Aboriginal woman, runs through a bushfire-devastated forest. The woman wears a gown that situates her in an earlier time. ' (Source: Nicholls, Histories Repeating: Recent Work by r e a, 2009)

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Image Credit: rea-artist

Natalie Harkin is a poet and artist of Narungga descent (SA), a member of the Chester family from Point Pearce in South Australia. She has professional experience in government and non-government sectors, but mostly in the Indigenous higher education sector in South Australia. She has worked at Wilto Yerlo and Yaitya Purruna at the University of Adelaide, the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research at the University of South Australia and is currently working as a Lecturer with the Yunggorendi Student Engagement team at Flinders University.

Source: AustLit

This poetic prose is a response to r e a’s work PolesApart –Tracking (2011) – single-channel video [7mins] reworked from the original PolesApart series, 2009. This new work in progress was created for the Stop(the)Gap/Mind(the)gap: International Indigenous art in motion, 2011, exhibition where r e a’s work was projected onto Hart’s Mill in Port Adelaide.

Source: Courting Blakness Sympoium Program

Full Biography on AustLit: Natalie Harkin

Image Credit: Photo of Natalie Harkin speaking at the AustLit BlackWords Symposium, 2012.

Michael Cook is an award-winning photographer of Bidjara heritage (South-West Queensland) who has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and London. His work is collected by major institutions including the National Gallery of Australia and The Owen and Wagner Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art (USA). He worked as a commercial photographer in Australia and overseas for twenty-five years.

In 2009, Cook began to make art photography, driven by an increasingly urgent desire to explore issues of identity. His photographic series are unique in their approach, and evocatively recreate incidents from Australian colonial history uniting the historical with the imaginary, the political with the personal. Visually striking, technically complex and with sensitive invention, they occupy a new space in the Australian artistic imagination.

Through My Eyes

An exploration of issues that surround identity is a central part of his approach to creating artwork, but the stories he develops have an equally universal application to humanity. He suggests, “I create artwork about Indigenous issues, past and present, about how the past relates to the present and, eventually, moulds the future. I’m not sure whether I really need to belong anywhere. Put simply, I’m a person of mixed ancestry–some of which is Indigenous. I look at the big picture, I am Australian, I tell my stories to Australians of all races and also to those beyond our shores. I am a part of the human race.

Source: Michael Cook

Michael Cook re-executes poster versions of photographs displaying 27 Australian Prime Ministers partially superimposed with Indigenous facial features to be placed along the cloister walls. These raise questions about the University as a space of authority where social concepts of race and gender have at different moments been reinforced and challenged over time.

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Full AustLit Biography: Michael Cook

Image Credit: Jordan Graham, Manuscript

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island in S.E. Queensland.

Works by Cope have been presented in Australia and abroad, including PARAsite Gallery in Hong Kong, and City Gallery, Wellington in New Zealand. Her work was exhibited in ‘Lie of the Land: New Australian Landscapes’ (2012) at the Embassy of Australia, Washington DC, USA, curated by Alex Taylor.

In 2013, Cope was commissioned to create a major site-specific work for the My Country, I still call Australia Home exhibition in the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. Cope has also had work commissioned for public collections including the Mater Hospital, Moreton Bay Regional Council, Gold Coast University Hospital Art Collection and the Museum of Brisbane. Cope’s work is included in the NEWflames Anne Gamble Myer collection.

Additionally, Cope has managed and curated several art spaces and projects including tinygold, Desperate Spaces, and the artist handbook So You Want To Be An Artist, published by Artworkers Alliance. She was the Creative Director of the Brisbane Artist Run Initiatives (BARI) Festival in 2009-10.

Cope is a member of the Brisbane-based Aboriginal Art Collective proppaNOW.

Source: Megan Cope

Megan Cope’s 7 minute video The Blaktism is a satirical new media work about the artist's recent experience obtaining her 'Certificate of Aboriginality' and the overwhelming sense of doubt experienced at the thought of being legitimately certified at 30 years of age. The work presents a baptism-like sacred ceremony whereby a young Quandamooka woman receives the rite to her authentic Aboriginality permitted by everyday Australians. This work translates issues of citizenship, power, prejudice and interrogates issues on cultural authority in the 21st century Australian political and cultural landscape.

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Full Biography on AustLit Megan Cope

Image Credit: Viscopy, Copyright Agency

Dr CHRISTIAN THOMPSON is an Australian-born, London-based contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity & history. He is a Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation from central western Queensland and is also of German-Jewish heritage. His mother’s family are from Gundagai in New South Wales.

As an artist, Thompson spurns classification both in terms of style, medium, time, occupation, history and heritage. His art practice is distinctive within Australia’s art scene – as an Aboriginal artist raised in the 1980s his work absorbs the influences of that time. His work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity & history. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson’s multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance & sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race and memory. Elements of pop culture, dance, fashion, performance and mass media combine with the relationship between objects, space and history. His work engages the viewer and challenges our understanding of Australian identity and what it means to 'be’ Australian. In his live performances and conceptual portraits, he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted costumes & carefully orchestrated poses & backdrops. In 2010 Thompson made history when he became the first Aboriginal Australian to be admitted into the University of Oxford in its 900-year history. He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art), Trinity College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Master of Theatre, Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, The Netherlands, Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) RMIT University and Honours (Sculpture) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. His works are held in major international and national collections.

Source: Christian Thompson

Christian Thompson's video Dhagunyilangu (Brother) welcomes visitors to campus while challenging preconceptions about how Indigenous people embody and perform their cultural heritage.

Source: Courting Blakness Symposium Program

Full Biography on AustLit: Christian Thompson

Image Credit: NITV on Christian Thompson website