TENNANT CREEK BRIO

The Brio fuse Aboriginal cultural heritage, the industrial materiality of the mining industry and regional and global art influences to express and re-imagine their cross-cultural identities and the reality of unresolved tensions between Indigenous and settler colonial cultures, the renewal and remaking of cultural practices, and the collaborative resilience of a frontier community. The collective’s deeply personal artworks draw upon complex intergenerational influences that continue to shape the artists lives and identities.

“Alloyed’ with their own invented imagery, the Brio’s art is in the spirit of bricolage and collectivity. Bricolage is a closely related idea first coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s in his study of Amazonian Indian epistemology and reprised in the 1970s and 80s in the context of poststructuralism and Appropriation art. As postmodernist-linguist Stephen Muecke describes: “Bricolage could be called the activity of roaming in the ruins of a culture” of acquiring and assembling “useful bits and pieces to keep things going or even make them function better.” The ruins roamed by the Brio are not limited to the Tennant Creek township and the waste of nearby abandoned mines, but also colonial myth, theology and other post and pre-contact cultural history.”*

ARTISTS

Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jangarrayi, Jimmy Frank Juppurla, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre ‘Double O’, Lévi McLean, and Arthur Jalyirri Dixon.

In collaboration with Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre and Arlpwe Art and Culture Centre.

* Extract from unpublished text by Lévi McLean