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Published March 8, 2004
Exhibition examines images of Australian native myth "the Dreaming"
Magdalena Ungwanaka, Honey Ant Dreaming, 1987, acrylic on canvas. Lent by Fannie and Alan Leslie '30 DMS '31 (image courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art)
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In Australian Aboriginal societies the epic narratives of "the Dreaming," the genesis of land and humanity, comprise the most powerful means of organizing and understanding the significance of place and people.
A new exhibition in the Hood Museum of Art's Gutman Gallery, Dreaming of Country: Painting, Place, and People in Australia, features 11 contemporary Aboriginal paintings that depict stories from the Dreaming. On view from March 6 to Aug. 29 these works evoke the Aboriginal connection between land and visual narrative that conveys and preserves cultural heritage, identity, and knowledge despite 200 years of oppressive settler governance and Aboriginal alienation from their homelands.
The Dreamings are stories that recount the lives of the ancestral beings who created the Australian landscape, its people, and the laws by which all living things should abide. Dotted patterns, concentric circles, arches, waves, and parallel lines symbolically represent the Australian landscape, which carries spiritual and mythological significance for the Aboriginal peoples.
Among the works in the exhibition are Ada Bird's Petyarre's Body Paint (1999), a canvas rippled with curving lines and rich colors that depict the designs traditionally painted on women's bodies for ritual ceremonies; Honey Ant Dreaming (1987), an acrylic painting by Magdalena Ungwanaka that combines common representations of honey ants and symbols such as small bars and ovals with a strikingly contemporary and bright color scheme; and Untitled (1999) by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri, which illustrates the formal conservatism of the traditional painting style through simple but contrasting color choices and the abundant use of older iconographies.
This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art and is funded by the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall Fund. Accompanying the exhibition, the films Night Cries (1990), Heaven (1997), Nice Colored Girls (1987), and Up in the Sky: Tracey Moffatt in New York (1999), by filmmakers Tracey Moffatt and Jane Cole, will be shown in the Sanders Seminar Room, next to Loew Auditorium, during museum hours.
This exhibition is offered as part of New Art Now, the Hood's ongoing focus on contemporary art in 2004.
By KEVIN PERRY '04
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