Michael Nelson Jagamara's New Expressions
There are those who would argue that a sense of 'nothingness' pervades the contemporary art scene in general, but for some artists 'nothingness ' is the product of complex and intriguing cultural dialectics that lie at the heart of their art practice. Michael Nelson Jagamara's recent series of paintings contribute to this realm of interest. Recently the Brisbane City Gallery hosted an exhibition of paintings by the Central Australian artist entitled ‘Without the story, the painting is nothing'1 In fact, since Nelson 's recent paintings are anti-narrative compared to his earlier work, the exhibition exploited an irony. Nelson is recognised for what is regarded as classic Western Desert acrylic painting, where meticulously designed and carefully worked symbols apparently narrate traditional stories particular to the artist's Dreamings. However, any suggestion of narrative is suspended in this new monosyllabic approach to painting. The works of the recent series, New Expressions, convey only fragments or single elements of the artist's former epic canvases and are explicitly decontextualised. Nelson has made it obvious that the stories required to 'understand' these images are absent, or are beyond the domain of the painting. For the non-indigenous audience the painting is without the story and so, as the exhibition 's title suggests, the painting is nothing. The exhibition didactics play with this irony, claiming that Nelson 's New Expressions encourage viewers to recognize meaningfulness, rather than meaning itself.2
Nelson's particular Dreamings are described in several didactic panels introducing the exhibition, however these truncated narratives serve more as signs of the artist's authority to paint these Dreamings, than as explanations of the complex relationships between story, identity, and image. Nor are they meant to explain... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline