Tensio (Kalar Midday series), 2004
Ilfochrome print
60.8
x 202.6
cm
number 3 from an edition of 10
SOLD
Provenance
Stills Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Another example of this work is illustrated in:
M Delany, 'Brook Andrew Eye to Eye', Monash University Museum of Art, 2007, pp. 24-25
‘I wanted to create something which didn't wear me out, and that was purely beauty, black beauty. To make a statement about aesthetics and photography, and originality in regards to looking at Australian animals and Aboriginal bodies as alive, seductive and divine. The politics is still there in all that blackness.’ (Brook Andrew, 2004)
Andrew uses an immaculately directed light source to reveal the mirrored image of a taxidermied currawong looking at a coiled snake. Like a contemporary translation of a creation story, the light falling on the scene is a metaphor for vision itself – a mythic ‘first sight’. The image takes museum objects and stories from the mythological Aboriginal world and destabilises our perceptions of them.
Andrew’s Kalar Midday (Land of Three Rivers) series was inspired by his mother’s Wiradjuri country, which spreads west from the Blue Mountains out across the plains crossed by the Macquarie, Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers.
As his starting point for the series that was two years in the making, Andrew wanted to create his own, beautiful images of Aboriginal subjects. He wanted to ‘push the sadness back into the black scape of it all.’ In these luscious dark Ilfachromes it is often said that he created a new black, referred to as a space of dreams.
Kalar Midday is an important series for Andrew due to the technical and intellectual depth of the images and the way they broke new ground in articulating stories of suffering whilst honouring the gravity of difficult human experiences.
Image courtesy of Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and the artist