Collective look beyond Aboriginal stereotypes

Exposed by Andrea Fisher looks at the way indigenous women are portrayed.

Making one's mark as an Aboriginal artist in Australia means more than making dot patterns from the dreamtime. Queensland-based collective proppaNOW has set out to challenge the stereotypes surrounding Aboriginal art.

Works by eight proppaNOW artists are on show this month at the Lane Gallery on O'Connell St in the collective's first international outing.

One of the artists, Jenny Fraser, who is working in New Zealand on a fellowship, says for many buyers, Aboriginal art isn't about the art.

"People like to buy their piece of desert art or dot art as a trade off for spirituality - something they can feel good about on their wall, or as an Australian experience," Fraser says.

She says the proppaNOW artists identify with the urban experience and they needed to develop collaborative structures to make up for a lack of art-world support.

"We noticed people think if you are from the city, you don't need an art centre or studio to make work, they assume you have access to galleries and dealers."

Most of the group went through art schools. Four are associated with Griffith University's ground-breaking Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art programme, the only Aboriginal-run art school in Queensland - Jennifer Herd and Vernon Ah Kee as teachers, Tony Albert and Andrea Fisher as former students.

Fraser and Bianca Beetson studied at Queensland University of Technology.

"It was often very isolating, being the only indigenous person in the class, but I found a lot of strength in that," says Fraser.

"While a lot of the other students were all over the place as to what they wanted their work to be about, I knew my work came from my ancestors so I did not have to think about it."

She says while all the artists in the show feel pressure to use symbols or make work which is recognisably Aboriginal, it doesn't come from their own people.

"If other Aboriginal people look at the work, they know it is Aboriginal," she says.

"It relates back to the land and to dreaming stories, now and in the future, not just 70,000 years ago."

Fraser, a multimedia artist who also curates an online indigenous gallery called cyberTribe, will show a work from her Faster Food series, which asked why food such as kangaroo wasn't more widely available, an image of road kill from her Hit the Road series, and Pacific Mermaid, a collaboration with New Zealand artist Bonnie Hutchinson based around a brown Barbie doll.

Herd, who started in theatre design and fashion before switching to teaching and practising art, will show a shield work based on her oral history and research into the Irvinebank massacre in her grandmother's home area of far north Queensland.

"She uses her own family stories to refute those historians who say there were no massacres," Fraser says.

Ah Kee's work explores racial stereotypes in texts as well as illustrations.

Richard Bell, who was one of the first wave of urban indigenousartists, also works with text and social commentary.

Fisher's work, Exposed, looks at the way indigenous women are portrayed in media photography.

Tony Albert's Welcome to Australia challenges the myths which have arisen around Captain Cook's "discovery".

In their artwork and jobs as educators and gallery and museum curators, the proppaNOW artists try to find ways to involve Aboriginal people. Fraser says while census and welfare statistics show most Aboriginals in Queensland live in urban or built up areas, they are almost invisible to the wider culture.

"You don't see them because they are not made welcome. Museums and galleries are not welcoming places. And Queensland is still a police state."

Exhibition

* What: Untitled by proppaNOW
* Where and when: Lane Gallery, 12 O'Connell St, to June 25