XIII. Where contradictions collide, 2015

 

Where contradictions collide is a publishing-research project presented as part of the exhibition 'Something Less' at the Meat Markets in Melbourne, a show that explored the narrative of Tasmanian history and mythology, and its place in the Australian national psyche.

 

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"For Where Contradictions Collide Doyle invited artists and writers to contribute a personal reflection on their lived experience of Indigeneity and colonisation. The texts offer differing contextual assessments and range across a transcript of a conversation between James and his grandmother alongside Léuli Eshraghi’s poetic lament on the demise of First Nation culture in New Caledonia. Anna Wattler’s incisive curiosity brings to light a treatise on Australian interracial sensibility with the viewpoint of her lived understanding of Germanic collective guilt, and this acts as an introduction to James Tylor’s ‘Un-resettling (dwellings)’ photographic series that challenges the accepted understanding of public space in Australia. Fernando do Campo’s portrait of a global citizen is rendered through the agency of that highly successful coloniser, the common House Sparrow. This witty aerial view is taken to poignantly ludicrous heights in Geoff Parr’s work ‘Spaceman-Two,’ an update to his original spacemen who arrived here in wind-ships around two centuries ago.

 

Doyle’s own contribution, ‘Still Image, Moving Image’ considers particular works by some of Australia’s most successful artists. All Australian Aboriginals employing digital and other contemporary media platforms, their contributions to an Australian discourse, and to expanding an understanding of the complex of Aboriginal identity and art practices are used to contest the popular idea of an homogenous Aboriginal art. Doyle’s choice to include analysis of Tracey Moffatt’s seminal 1989 work, ‘Something More #1,’ aligns the publication squarely with Liam James’s raw homage, ‘Something Less.’"

 

(Foreword, Michael Edwards)

 

ISBN: 9780646955346