ProppaNOW collective
This was touted as the first curated commercial showing by urban Indigenous collective ProppaNOW. George Petelin’s Gold Coast gallery was a clever choice of venue, theoretically speaking anyway. Opened last year, it is a stones throw from tourist-driven Surfers Paradise, mecca for Australiana, souvenir didges and ornamental boomerangs. It is this kind of culture-for-the-taking that ProppaNOW artists have reacted against. They have also vocally opposed the labels ascribed to Indigenous art and identity by non-Indigenous people, in particular a belief that the ‘authentic’ Aboriginal art is made in the deserts and remote communities and in the ‘dot’ style so highly publicised and marketed. Whether or not many of the tourists shopping at Cavill Avenue made the short distance to Petelin’s is another story and possibly a large part of the battle.
The exhibition included several works by each artist. While these did not cross into collaborative ventures, there was a sense of the group forum as a means for germinating ideas, in the tradition of Campfire, and more recently NEWflames, both groups having also included ProppaNOW members. The strong public presence of the group and its individual artists in a sector still in many respects unhealthily determined by white values, is the kind of powerful, self-determining force Australia needs—and not least in the arts industry. In this vein, one of ProppaNOW’s aims has been to mentor younger artists, in this case Tony Albert and Andrea Fisher, both of whom are developing into interesting artists in their own right.
One of the key strands running through the show meditated upon identity and a kind of ‘deferral’. To explain this more fully, several artists positioned identity as something still in