PRESS RELEASE

 

 

Lovaas Projects in collaboration with ONELAND is pleased to present Yamaga, a special exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Australian painting. The exhibition includes works by leading emerging artists from 16 different Aboriginal nations spanning 1,371,000 square km of the Australian desert. 

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Indigenous people have lived in the remote Australian deserts for many thousands of years. Their painting has evolved from patterns of sand art and ceremonial body decorations into paintings representing a visual transposition of ancient stories and traditions. In these paintings artists reexamine traditional imagery and present their culture to outsiders through transcendental visual codes. Informed by generations of learning and survival, these paintings represent a beautiful survey of Indigenous knowledge. 

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Many of the works in this exhibition, reveal the ways in which the current generation of Indigenous Australian artists are responding to previous generations and underscore the increasingly prominent role of the women artists. While the first Western Desert paintings mostly depicted symbols and ideograms, many artists today seek to obfuscate overt references, dotting and over-dotting as a means of protecting sacred designs. This strategy of exposition and concealment yields a new visual language in which artists portray a continuum between states of waking and dreaming, ephemerality and permanence, representation and direct experience. Many paintings refer to sites of sacred or historical significance, acting as maps of real space as well as the subconscious realms of memory and dreams. In others the winding lines and coils refer to ancestral pythons, local topography, and vegetation. 

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Despite the similarity to mainstream abstraction, Indigenous Australian art emerges from a fundamentally different line of artistic inquiry. Rather than reacting to formal artistic training and conceptual ideas from which they are largely isolated, the Australian Aboriginal painters condense many layers of history and their own experiences into a dazzling diversity of visual languages, connecting contemporary viewers to the most ancient surviving culture in the world. 

The Australian Aboriginal art Lovaas Projects is presenting in Yamaga depicts the beauty of the interaction 60,000 years of survival and ancient culture with the modern world today in a unique and fresh artistic manifestation. We feel honored to be entrusted by the desert tribes with these artworks and to exhibit their artwork on “the other side of the world”. 

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With special thanks to Susie Agoston and ONELAND. 

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ONELAND is an Australian Charitable Foundation promoting social justice and humanitarian objectives for Australian Indigenous children by supporting their families of Aboriginal artists in remote communities. Susie Agoston has been honored to be included by the Yolgnu Nation of East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory Australia, and has been given a skin name “Wamatjin” sister to the prestigious Gurruwiwi family. She has been given “Dharrmbungi Marrangigi” which is a representation of the ONELAND ethos, literally translating to Learning together. 

Susie Agoston is the founder and CEO of ONELAND.