Vernon Ah KeePractice

Vernon Ah Kee’s

Artistic Practice

Ah Kee‘s artistic practice is informed and produced within the urban context from Aboriginal experience of contemporary life.

His work explores Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture in contemporary society.

Vernon Ah Kee creates work dealing with issues facing Australian Indigenous culture in a post-colonial society.

His art is primarily a critique of Australian popular culture, specifically the Black/White divide.

Fantasies of the Good series (2004)

MCA

Ah Kee‘s installation of 13 sensitively-drawn charcoal portraits of family, relatives and ancestors from Palm Island, Queensland, were inspired by the photographs of Norman Tindale, an anthropologist who documented Aboriginal people from all over Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s.

"There was an anthropologist who went around Australia to Aboriginal communities from the 1930s to the 1960s, who was basically documenting the dying species," he says. "So he was recording them and giving them number classifications and things like that.”

After requesting photographs of his own family from the collection of the South Australian Museum, Vernon Ah Kee began to make sensitive drawings from these photographs, emphasising the eugenicist (yoojanist-ways of improving human by selective breeding) subtext of the original photographs.

While a valuable record, particularly of the connection of Aboriginal peoples to specific lands, the photographs also infer a degree of underlying racism present in Australian society, a subject that Ah Kee regularly addresses in his drawings and text works.

This is reflected in the off - centre composition of Ah Kee‘s drawings. The artist‘s cool, precise drawing style is also suggestive of the ways that art (and especially photography) is able to aestheticise or manipulate the truth of situations, although the piercing gazes of Ah Kee‘s subjects provide a subtle yet deliberate measure of directness and emotional intensity.

• The facial resemblances in these compelling portraits suggest an ongoing familial connection, reaffirming the artist‘s place within the group and anchoring his position in the world. This genealogical study of the men in Ah Kee‘s family is a visual record of the solidarity, continuity and endurance of a single family and, by extension, of Aboriginal culture.

Gaze series (2008) Biennale of Sydney

In 2008 Vernon Ah Kee exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney a series of 12 charcoal and pastel drawings on canvas that continued his series of portraits of his family.

The focus of each subject is their gaze, the way they look back at the viewer. This is designed to cause the viewer to feel a sense of discomfort, as the confrontational act of the stare is strongly felt.

As previously, the drawings are a response to the anthropological romanticised historical portraits of Aboriginals and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from something that is in a museum to modern day people living real and contemporary lives.

The Brisbane artist used the photographic records as a basis of Gaze, a series of drawings prepared for the Biennale that recasts his grandparents and great-grandparents as beautiful - and human - subjects of portraiture in Australian art.

"[I want to] remove ideas of the noble savage and the exotic other, 'cause I want these people to be people, and to be deep-thinking, intelligent, emotive, complex and all the things that other people are allowed to be except for black fellas," he says.

Unwritten (2010).Charcoal on paper.

A small series in response to the death in police custody of a young man, Mulrunji, on Palm Island in 2004. The apparent police cover up and protection of their own lead to accusations of racism, riots by the Islanders, and their further oppression by the police.

The faces conjure not only from the 2004 Islanders, but of the haunting history of racism and oppressions that have gone back through the generations.

If I Was White

(2002). Inkjet print on

polystyrene

board on

polyvinyl

chloride

(238 x 137cm)

If I Was White comprises a set of 30 small texts with the title, If I was White. The text-based installation speaks directly to a white audience through an (invisible) chorus of black voices.

One reads, “If I was White I could walk down the street and people would pay no particular attention to me.” Beneath, in smaller text, Ah Kee expands on this matter-of-fact observation: “White people in particular have little understanding of Whiteness even though every White person in the country is an experienced practitioner.”

Black people however, do have some understanding of ‘Whiteness’.

This text continues for the entire page, and another, and another. In this fashion, Ah Kee turns the notion of extremity into a stream of thoughts and observations that becomes a river.

This text-based installation work reveals and condemns the widespread and inescapable discrimination and racial stereotyping that Indigenous Australians have experienced since European colonisation and continue to experience in everyday life.