Vernon Ah Kee, Jewel McKenzie, Kim Demuth, Annie Hogan
The premise of 4x4 was the selection of four emerging artists by four curators: the work of Vernon Ah Kee was curated by Michael Snelling, Jewel McKenzie by David Broker, Kim Demuth by Julie Walsh and Annie Hogan by Ruth McDougall. These were presented at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) as four solo shows rather than a curated group exhibition. The presentation of work ranged from survey style showings to exclusively new bodies of work, and from the exploration of political and social spaces by Ah Kee and McKenzie to the more interior and private spaces explored by Demuth and Hogan.
Vernon Ah Kee’s exhibition consent presented a new body of work that replays the black and white text format of his earlier works and strongly references a sloganistic poster style. This aesthetic is enhanced by the use of vinyl and acrylic on board and the uniformly poster size of each work (180 x 120 cm). The formal simplicity of Ah Kee’s work belies the subtlety of humour and language games he employs to speak of his experiences as an Indigenous man in contemporary Australian society. These text works function on the level of word play, exploiting the literalness of words, their dictionary definitions, literary associations and historical connotations, to expose a double-play in their meaning. Ah Kee finds and exposes the hidden ‘aust’ in words such as faust, holocaust and caustic, he finds the ‘aust’ implicit in the explicit showing of ostracism (austracism). Ah Kee’s humour reveals a razor sharp, dark edge—admiration for his language games becomes more complicated when these plays suddenly become serious. These works demand a thoughtful response to a sometimes off-hand simplicity.
A consistent