APT7 Exhibition Report

APT7 exhibiting artist Timothy Cook (far right) with the Tiwi Dancers from Milikapiti, Melville Island, during their opening weekend performance; Cook’s works surround the performers. opposite Lorraine Connelly-Northey discussing her work in APT7, GOMA, December 2012 The strength and diversity of Indigenous Australian art, and its central place in Australian culture, was a major focus for APT7. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists have featured in every APT since its inception in 1993, and APT7 saw the greatest representation of Indigenous Australian artists to date. APT7 featured new and recent works by five Indigenous artists from across Australia. Works included Cairns‑born, Sydney‑based Daniel Boyd’s paintings and video installation, which used the idea of the ‘dot’ as a lens through which the world is viewed and distorted; Sunshine Coast artist Michael Cook’s photographic series, Civilised , which featured Aboriginal models dressed in the garb of European colonial powers; and Timothy Cook’s sublime paintings and tutini (burial poles), which drew on the central Tiwi ceremonies of Pukumani and Kulama. Major new commissions included Queensland artist Shirley Macnamara’s elegant installation based on transient bush shelters, and New South Wales artist Lorraine Connelly‑Northey’s gigantic metal and wire sculptures based on narbongs (collecting bags), which expressed ideas of transformation, adaptation and resilience while also affirming deep connections to country. Other Australian artists included Louisa Bufardeci and Susan Jacobs. For APT7 Susan Jacobs’s work Frontier arranged a series of sculptural objects in a diagonal trajectory in the gallery space. Melbourne‑based Louisa Bufardeci’s sculpture and wall‑painting was inspired by the hidden spatial dimensions that have been proposed by some theoretical physicists attempting to explain the workings of the universe. austraLia 25 EXHIBITION