Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

The gradual disappearance of Aboriginal figures and culture from the colonial landscape is one of the great tragic themes of Australian art. The reinsertion of that Indigenous presence into our history and the questioning of the idea of a shared national identity have underpinned the work of many contemporary Indigenous artists, including the photographer, performance and video artist, Christian Thompson. The images in Lost Together emerge from his two-year residency in The Netherlands, and reflect his ‘need to imbue a sense of Australia into the world’. This series of large C-type ‘portraits in the landscape’ again evoke echoes of the colonial landscape — but one transformed into a quirky almost phantasmagorical afterimage. In some works, the fictional-cum-autobiographical character appears within a dark, northern wooded scene, dressed in vivid exotic costume and brandishing an orange ‘Flowering Spear’ — a curious role-reversal of the early European settlers to Australia who planted the Union Jack in the New World. More puzzling and even more entertaining is the bearded tartan-clad character, again posed within the dense European landscape, who appears in a number of works such as Isaac-1 2008 and Dead as a Door Nail 2008. The beard and axe, and woodland setting trigger in any Australian onlooker memories of colonial icons such as Tom Robert’s The Wood Splitters 1886 and Fred McCubbin’s The Pioneer 1904. Is the tartan an oblique reference to Scottish sounding McCubbin, you can’t help thinking? Of course, the fact that the character is wearing a tartan dress rather than a tartan kilt tends to prevent one from applying too portentous an interpretation to such absurdly anarchic images. The artist’s delight in playing with Australia’s cultural history is tempered by his parallel desire to ‘portray identity (be it cultural, sexual, racial) in a constant state of flux’. In both these exhibitions, nevertheless, the ability of colonial landscape painting to inspire and challenge contemporary photographers is certainly reaffirmed. Text from (not) out of the woods (yet) by Alison Inglis You can find more of Christians work here: www.christianthompson.net