Imagine landscape painting based on the inverse of Albertian perspective and you have a sense of a Samantha Hobson landscapes. These are landscapes in as much as they are about specific places and what happens there, but almost every other aspect resists conventional modes of appeal—be they perspectival, modernist or Aboriginal. The resistance stems from an undisciplined passion in the fire paintings that rage; the Friday night paintings that bleed; and the nocturnal coral spawn paintings that quiver with life. But resistance runs deeper in the almost brutal refusal to comply with ‘identity’ frameworks. Hobson is one of the leading contemporary artists from the far North Queensland Aboriginal community of Lockhart River, but this ‘origin’ does not define her art—it simply initiates it. As spectators, we cannot confine this art ethnographically or aesthetically, and it is a liberating experience for all.
Hobson’s recent exhibition of paintings at Brisbane’s Andrew Baker Art Dealer profiled the diversity of her oeuvre, including a range of landscape-style works along with paintings featuring stylised iconographically-inspired elements relating to family relationships. Descriptions of her art are a constant struggle with words, and it is not because technical aspects of the painting are unconventional so much as the way that works elicit a tension between different channels of cultural communication—they confuse the channels and shift the spectator’s position. Representational art shifts to abstract expressionism shifts to Aboriginal iconography.
Landscapes based on Albertian perspective create a static sense of order; the order of systematic relationships between figures in space; the illusion of three-dimensional space; and the reality of two-dimensional pictorial space. The gridded geometry of this space fixes the spectator in a notional ‘viewing situation’. You see... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline