Leading Australian artist Tony Albert has opened his first major solo exhibition entitled Visible at the Queensland Art Gallery.
“It is my showcase of Aboriginal art,” Tony explains.
“It is a little bit retrospective, it is a classic combination of many things, but basically it is my first institutional solo show and it pulls together work from around the last decade, which is quite exciting. We've got stuff here from all over Australia, and some pieces back from overseas, and also I used to work at the Queensland Art Gallery many years ago, so it is this nice, full circle.”
The collection comprises works in a number of mediums including found object collage, painting, photography and installation. Many of Tony's pieces have been built on his own passion for collecting 'Aboriginalia' – decorative kitsch items of Australiana featuring Aboriginal people and imagery.
“There's a big portion of the show made up of works of Aboriginalia, and because it's the first institutional show we've chosen to actually display a whole lot of the collection, which I think is important for the first one. It's an introduction to how nice the collection is and how some of the works are inspired,” Tony says.
Tony says his personal collection of Aboriginalia numbers in the tens of thousands, having collected them for over 30 years since he was a child.
“I first started to collect Aboriginalia as a child, but before it was incorporated into artwork of any kind,” he says.
“We would frequent secondhand shops all the time as children, and that's where I uncovered the first forms of Aboriginalia, and it came at a very innocent time, a childhood perspective where I just thought the objects were fascinating, they had Aboriginal people on them and they had Aboriginal imagery at a time when it was void in all areas, not on TV. I just really fell in love with the objects, so that's where the collection started.”
Tony also integrates pieces of Aboriginalia into sculptural, text-based installations with deeply political and historical connotations.
As an Aboriginal artist, Tony says he works to peel back layers of history that have come to obfuscate the true story of Australia and its First Peoples. In calling the exhibition Visible, Tony subverts the notion of Indigenous culture and his own work as an artist as an unseen presence.
“Well a lot of the work and realisation of it in terms of visibility, and history, I often find in art a good idea of truth and there's heaps of that to look at within Australian history,” Tony says.
“For a really long time, I felt really invisible. As a person, as an artist, and I guess visibility just became a part of how I wanted to assert myself in this institutional show and it's a poetic response to the show.”
