once upon a time in the centre
The drawings and paintings on paper in this exhibition are the continuation of a body of work begun by Rod Moss in the early 1980s, precipitated by his move to the Northern Territory from Victoria. Moss originally began producing landscape drawings as a means of coming to grips with the alien terrain of Alice Springs. However, an encounter with the children of a group of eastern Arrernte people living in camps at Whitegate, outside town, led to Moss's gradual engagement with these families, and their inclusion in his imagery of the Centre. It is these people who populate his large-scale figurative works. Dubbed 'realist documentary' paintings, Moss's works in fact play on the notion of truth-value inherent in realist painting. Drawing on his large collection of snapshot photographs, Moss creates both tableaux depicting real scenes and events, and enigmatically allegorical compositions.
Advocates of Moss's work argue that it has not received the exposure it deserves. It is perhaps not impossible for us to understand why this might be so. These works are hard to look at, almost everything about them inducing in the viewer a sense of unease. Moss has developed an unusual technique in which the bodies of Aboriginal figures are subtly rendered in graphite pencil, with the remainder of the image, including any non-Aboriginal figures, painted loudly in acrylic paint using a nee-pointillist style and intensely high-key chroma. Moss's choice of media produces a collision between modalities perceived as oppositions - draughtsmanship versus painterliness, objectivity versus subjectivity, realism versus expressivity - that does not sit neatly within conventional notions of high art, but strays dangerously close to kitsch.
Even more problematic is Moss's subject matter. How are we