- I'd like to pass over to our panel now who are gonna be talking at about our brand new exhibition, "Who are You?" It's a collaborative exhibition between the National Gallery Victoria and the National Portrait Gallery. And it's only just launched. So we really encourage all of our audiences online and onsite to go in and have a look at this amazing exhibition. It's bringing together both of our collections in such a beautiful way. The exhibition has such incredible impact, so I really do encourage you to get in and take your time and wander through and absorb all the amazing portraiture that's on display. It's here in Canberra until 29 January next year, so you have plenty of time and in the meantime, let's ask the curators of this particular exhibition to give us a little bit of an intro. Over to you Jo.
- Well, good afternoon everyone, and thanks so much for joining us for this discussion about, "Who are You? Wonderful exhibition that we have been very fortunate, we at the NPG, have been very fortunate to work on with our colleagues at the NGV in Melbourne. My name's Joanna Gilmore. I'm the Curator of Collection and Research here at the NPG and one of several curators who over the past few years have contributed to the realisation of this exhibition. I'm really delighted to be joined by fellow curators and I'll allow you to introduce yourselves 'cause I'm likely to forget your job titles.
- So my name's Beckett Rozentals, I'm Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria and began working on this project with Jo and then as well as Rebecca, a number of years ago now. And it's been a really, you know, wonderful collaboration between the twin institutions and a pleasure to work on the exhibition.
- Yeah, thank you Beckett. So my name is Rebecca Ray and I'm the First Nations Curator here at the National Portrait Gallery. I'm a Meriam woman, from the centre from the Torres Strait Islands connected to Mer, Mabuiag, Badu and Moa as well, so kind of all of the islands there. But yeah, it was a wonderful exhibition to collaborative work on. My first time doing such a large exhibition in terms of collaboration between two institutions, one of the biggest ones in Australia, or the biggest one in Australia, and then I guess the smallest institution as well. So it's been a wonderful time working with the curators on this show.
- Yeah, and it's interesting actually, sort of it's, 'cause it's opened here now, obviously. It was in Melbourne at the NGV earlier this year from March to September. But we, Beckett and I, are kind of like the last ones standing really. So, been multiple curators working on it since kind of towards the end of 2019.
- 2019.
- So it's really interesting. I'm trying to cast my mind back and try and think about what it was we were actually sort of talking about initially on and to, at the very beginning of the project and to see the way it's realised. It's really exciting. But also, it's been a real sort of memory jog for us. I guess I'll kick off, I think, by talking a little bit about how it feels from the Portrait Gallery's perspective to have worked on this exhibition. And I know this is something I'm probably hypersensitive about, but when you work in an institution like this one, you become very aware very quickly that there's a perception that portraiture is all about a, what someone sort of looks like from the outside. And b, that portraits are very much about the subject of the work. And that's, you know, that's all that matters. Whereas in fact, and a lot of people I don't think probably realise this when they think of the National Portrait Gallery. We have always very much been as much about the artist as about the sitter and very specifically about the choices that artists make when they're trying to, or seeking to represent an individual story or an individual life. And so I think from my perspective, remembering back to 2019 when we first started working on the project that became, "Who Are You?", I was very conscious that we create an exhibition that actually puts the Portrait Gallery's collection in conversation with the NGV in such a way as to bring those kind of, those more creative, those more sort of artistic aspects of our collection to light and to create an exhibition that is very much about, not the limitations of portraiture as a genre, but it's incredible capacities really for telling, not just what someone looks like, but telling their whole sort of story. Telling stories about place, about identity, about memory, spirituality, all sorts of aspects that come into the representation of a person. And I'm not sure if you can remember back, Beckett, to some of those early discussions too, but what we agreed on was we distilled it down, I suppose distilled the whole project down, into these five themes that we thought would allow us to explore this very broad church, this very kind of expansive notion of what portraiture is.
- Yeah, and I think that through those original conversations as well, we were, you know, also looking at two very large bodies of works and collections and putting those together. And I think in our first lookings of our checklist, we had over 400, 500 works.
- [Joanna] Yeah.
- Which, we went big, cast the net very wide. And then brought it in and I think for the showing at the NGV we had about 230 works, and it's 130 for here. And I think one of the key curatorial, which we brought to it was that it seemed, it might be a little obvious from this exhibition when she was looking at reframing the genre to walk into meeting the artists. So walking into self-portraits or portraits of artists. And so we shifted this around a little bit, beginning the exhibition with, "Person and Place" and reflecting on the relationship between the artist, sitter and the environment. And so that was, we felt sort of, gave a different start to the exhibition to what people might first expect.
- Yeah, and that of course is how the exhibition starts here as well. We might get the first slide, Hector, if that's okay? And Beck is going to tell us a little bit about this wonderful, fabulous painting from the NGV's collection by Kaylene Whiskey, which is sort of the, it's the highlight of the "Person and Place" section for me.
- Yeah, I think so for me as well. I just love Kaylene Whiskey. She's such a superstar, but this work, her work, "Seven Sisters Song", very much a self-portrait, but I guess you wouldn't really expect it to be a self-portrait when you first look at it. But again, it's very much situated in this idea of place and portrait and person and identity. So let's start off with Kaylene Whiskey first. She is an Aboriginal woman living out in Iwantja in the remote community in the APY Lands. And I think the title of this work is really important as well, so we have, "Seven Sisters Songs." So, "The Seven Sisters", it's a Creation Story that connects a lot of different regions across Australia through different song lines and through different stories of Creation and Ancestral Beings and all of these ideas. So again, it's reframing this idea of place and, you know, place becomes meaningful through these relations, through these storytelling and where the inanimate becomes really quite being important and personified and it, particularly in the context of an Aboriginal person, it speaks to a knowing of country and sovereignty. And I feel that this work really expresses this and in the way that Kaylene has put in these, in these notions of the APY Lands and these community places as well. So you have examples of bush tucker, you have mingkulpa, which is Native tobacco, that's quite it, that's in the region. You've also got a lot of iconography such as the honey ants and these type of things. But what's really great about the work too, with Kaylene Whiskey, she's really known for her unique visual language and pop culture references. So you can see Wonder Woman and you can see Dolly Parton and Tina Turner. And these characters really make up this idea of the Seven Sisters. And even though this is a self-portrait relating to place, we can see that through all of these iconographies, through these characters, they really talk about her experiences of growing up on country, but also the references that she grew up with and her history. So Kaylene grew up reading comic books. She grew up watching Rage and all of these pop figures and dancing and so that really informed her worldview as well and you can see all these wonderful motifs of the Aboriginal flag through the Aboriginal colours as well. And another fantastic aspect of the work as well is that it's actually painted on a road sign that says, "Iwantja Arts and Craft Centre." And it's almost as if it's like directing these characters to come to community and spend time with her. So it takes on more than just likeness, more than representation of a person, but it incorporates an understanding and knowing of country. It takes on characters that she grew up with in her childhood and very much today as well. So it all sort of informs her identity and her character as a self-portrait.
- Yeah, and I love the way that it's painted on an old road sign and sort of what that reference is terms of what people seeing a sign saying, "Iwantja". What they might conceive in their minds. And it's like, you know, this is like a disco. It's not like, no it's just such a fantastically powerful and uplifting work.
- Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
- And you can sort of just see hidden in there that it says, "Turn left".
- Yeah.
- And when you see it in the flesh as well, you can, something which doesn't come up when you're looking at a reproduction is how retro reflective elements flicker and shine as you look at it and change as you move around the work. So it's got that sort of like luminous quality to it as well which really lifts it.
- Yeah, and Beckett, you had another work from the "Person and Place" theme.
- Yes, the Lloyd Rees-
- [Joanna] Yeah, which I think is, people aren't gonna expect to see when they come to an exhibition called, "Australian Portraiture."
- And I think that this is a really great work to have in this opening section 'cause that is really shifting that idea of the traditional portrait genre. And I think that it's such a wonderful work is that, so Lloyd Rees has taken the rock formations and just by the titling in itself of, "Portrait of some Rocks", it turns these inanimate objects into animated things. It gives them a persona, a personality, the little one at the front of the portrait, the little baby rock. And suddenly the way you engage with it in a similar way it's been titled and also Lloyd Rees from the 1930's, his whole body of work was really focused on land formations. The idea of the rock as part of the earth, the embodiment of the earth coming up and out. And so it became a motif which went through across all of his career, especially driving from Sydney South through to Berry. And then in his older years living in Tasmania, he became quite transfixed by the Organ Pipes at Mount Wellington. So I think this is a fabulous work, which people really will be, I guess a little bit surprised to see this personification of the landscape and it's alongside Holly Pepper's show, which I've probably said incorrectly just now and her works, which also are that sort of like, the land coming to life. So it's a really great section and I think it's really fun with the Kaylene Whiskey.
- Yeah, absolutely. I think this idea of the inanimate becoming personified is really important when we start talking about the relationship with place and space and what happens when space becomes place.
- Yeah. So having introduced or started off the exhibition with, "Person and Place", we then move into a section of the exhibition which is, I guess, includes once again a real sort of diversity in terms of representation and the capacities of portraiture. It's a section called, "Meet the Artist" which as the name of the theme might suggest is very much about self-portraiture and specifically about that sort of integration or that relationship between an artist's own sort of self-identity and their kind of creative practise and their creative identity as well. So we'll move to the next slide, Hector, if that's okay? And this is actually one of the first works that you'll see when you come into "Meet the Artist." One of my easily, one of my favourite works from the NPG's collection. A beautiful little self portrait by Nora Heysen, which we acquired directly from Nora in 1999. It was painted in 1934, so she was still only what, 23 or so years old when this work was created. But for me it's really sort of interesting in terms of the context of other self-portraits that Nora was making at this time. So we all know that, that surname, "Heysen", she was of course the daughter of Sir Hans Heysen, a very distinguished Australian landscape painter. And so you can imagine as an artist kind of growing up in that shadow and with that reputation to contend with, you can understand why it was that Nora decided to focus on portraiture, particularly when she was first starting out and she made self-portraits throughout her long life. But this work is actually really interesting because it's not the only self-portrait she made when she was in her early twenties. There are a number of others, including one that was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia, which of course is where Nora was from. Acquired when she was still very young at art school. But interestingly of the portraits that she made, self-portraits that she made in the early 1930's, this one really stands out because it's just her kind of analysing herself. Whereas in the earlier work, she's very much presenting herself, consciously presenting herself, like performing in a way as an artist. You know, she's wearing a smock or she's seated at an easel, or she's holding a pallet. Her palette is one that Dame Nellie Melba gifted to her. So it's very much this kind of outward performance. Whereas this work is her, made when she was, had not long arrived, not long after she arrived in London. She'd been travelling around with her parents and with her sisters in Europe, and then they deposited her in London and she was gonna be there for the next few years studying and so forth. And so it's kind of like her in her little flat, wearing her nice warm jacket and her nice warm jumper and just kind of confronting herself for the first time in a way. There's no performance. There's no artifice. It's just Nora sort of thinking, "Well, this just got real."
- And all signifiers of the artist have been removed, all signifiers of wealth or status.
- Yeah.
- Everything and brought back to that straight on view, which is, as you said, very different to those performative ones. And interestingly you mentioned the jumper in that as well. We've got a George Bell work in the exhibition, "Toinette", which was also painted in 1934 in London and is also of a similar composition of his daughter in the close frame front on, and she's actually wearing exactly the same jumper, but in a yellow colour. And I always think about this 1934 London, obviously that was a bit of an item, but just, you know, you don't really see it between the two works when you're looking, and I guess this is also the beauty of working across two collections where this works from the National Portrait Gallery and the George Bell works from the NGV and suddenly you don't even see this sort of fashion item or the way the portraits have been done the same until you put these collections together and you suddenly got them side by side. You're like, these are both 1934 London. And these are both the same composition and they're both wearing these similar and it's just something really fascinating what you get from your own collection viewing it in context with another collection as well.
- Having said that the "Meet the Artist" section includes lots of what people would traditionally think of as a portrait. There are also a number of works in "Meet the Artist" that are most certainly not what you would expect to see. We might have a look at the next slide. Thanks, Hector. Try the next one after that, we might get back to William. Yeah, so this is a fabulous work by Jenny Watson which I'm also gonna ask Beckett to tell us about.
- Looking at self-portraits, I mean, self-portraits are a particularly fascinating facet of portraiture because it's that, uniting the artist and the sitter and of course what an artist, the self-portrait is a genre which gives this promise of intimate access into the artist's psyche. But at the same time, what an artist might choose to present about themselves can be highly orchestrated, as we were saying with the Nora Heysen. You might choose to place yourself, depict yourself in the role of the artist holding the paintbrush or the paint palette. And you might choose how you show that you know what sort of artist you are or you know something about yourself. But there are a couple of works in this section which really show, I think, the performance element of portraiture, self-portraiture. For instance, this work by Jenny Watson and it's this combination of image and text and it's written, I feel like, I can't quite read it off of the top of my head. "I feel like when my father used to brush my hair." And it's almost like reading a page from her diary, but it's paired this conversation, this memory of her father brushing her hair, with this image of a woman with a fake horse hair, horsetail of her hair, dressed as this Playboy Bunny. But holding a toilet brush next to the toilet. And with this, it puts together a really it's fetish, domesticity, performance and how performance, clothing and dress can influence how we perceive ourselves and each other. And it's just such a curiously fascinating work. All the stuff which she's managing to get into, especially with that use of that paired text panel with it really activates the portrait itself. And speaking of performance, with the next slide, this is one of my-
- [Joanna] Yeah. This is fascinating, this.
- It's one of my favourite works in the exhibition. It's petite, it's a small work on paper by Napier Waller and it's, "The Man in Black, 1925." Now in 1917, Napier Wallow was, joined the war. He was in the Australian Imperial Force and he was involved in active service in France, and he was severely injured. And the result of this was the amputation of his right arm from the shoulder. While in convalescence, the right-handed Napier Waller had to reteach himself how to write, how to draw. His whole artistic practise. He had to reteach himself to do it left-handed. And so he's done this while recovering from the surgery. This work he's completed many years after this amputation. But what he's done is in this work, he's dressed himself, the debonair artist, the black suit coat, the top hat. And behind him another sort of thing you do as an artist when you're doing a self-portrait, it's like, "Look at me, this is something I've done before." It's the cartoon of his work for the State Library in Melbourne. So this is a great thing to do if you're doing a self-portrait. It's like, "This is me and here's an example of something I can do. Here is me and here is my work." But what's so curious about this work is, and it's that thing, that cross through the centre of the painting, centre of the work. And it's at the point of his hands where he has completed himself as whole, again. As intact as prior to this horrific injury which resulted in the loss of his arm. And it's this moment of performance, this is his self-portrait, it's how he's choosing to show himself. Is it this validation of himself as a man or as an artist? This idea, or is it, "This is my self-portrait and I can complete myself again." And so it's a, I think a really fascinating work to look at. It's this idea of self-portraits and performance and how one chooses to present and what they choose to include or omit from an image. So it's a great one to have in.
- Yeah, and in light of that, maybe John Nixon's component which I think is possibly the work that will confuse most visitors to the exhibition and it's almost like, if he can get the opposite of what Napier Waller was doing with his self-portrait. You've got John Nixon pretty much just kind of reducing himself to a gesture, which he used very frequently in his abstract painting. So, yeah. And could we skip back just briefly? We, missed William Yang. Sorry, Hector, I put them in the wrong order. So once, we were talking a little bit with Jenny Watson about that sort of relationship between text and portraiture. And this is a fabulous example. This is a work which is from our collection although when it was in Melbourne, you displayed your print of the same work. Beautiful self-portrait by William Yang in which he has taken a photograph of himself as a little boy and inscribed onto it his memory of discovering his Chinese heritage. And he tells a little story about how he was a little boy, he grew up near Cairns in far north Queensland and grew up in family who kinda repudiated their Chinese heritage simply because they were trying to desperately sort of fit in. And yeah, he went to school one day and one of his classmates so called called him Ching Chong Chinaman, born in a teacup and he went home to his mum having experienced this and said, "Mum, we're not, I'm not Chinese, am I?" And she said, "Yes, you are." And that was how he found out about his heritage and he's inscribed this onto his image.
- And when he speaks about this, his mother's reaction and response to him, it's like, he's like this realisation that it was, she put it like it was coming across as a curse, it was a bad thing. And he really struggled with this. And also that his parents' shared language was English and they both had different, came from different areas from China and so it was that really odd internal struggle for William as a child. Their shared language at home is English, feeling different and feeling like this difference and never, ever, and the beautiful piece you wrote for the catalogue of just what advice would you give yourself as a, to your teenage self? And it's just like, something along this, you're beautiful, you are perfect the way you are. And it's just so touching this sort of self-reflection of what is the one bit of advice you would give yourself who was struggling. So, yeah.
- No, it's a really fantastic section of the exhibition. I think you could spend hours just in, "Meet the Artist" itself, but we need to move on. The next theme we chose was one called, "Intimacy and Alienation." And I guess that whole idea of intimacy, of a relationship, is something that's as old as portraiture, is essentially certainly one of the things I first learned when I started working here at the NPG was to test the strength of a portrait was to try and get a sense of the strength of that connection between the artist and the sitter. And for most, well, for all of portraiture's history, really, it's more often than not portraits have been made because of some kind of a relationship. You make them because you love someone, because you miss someone, because someone's passed away, et cetera, et cetera. And this, I think is another work from the NGV's collection, fabulous painting by Hugh Ramsay of his little sister, Jessie. This is made in 1897, so a few years before Ramsay himself went overseas to study in Paris, but just such a gorgeous work on all sorts of levels. And of course, I guess the sad thing about Hugh Ramsay is that, as you know, he went to Paris, he lived there for a number of years and literally was that sort of, almost that sort of stereotype of an artist kind of starving, you know. Garrett, pretty much, he was short on funds. I think the only reason he got a square meal occasionally was 'cause he was living up the street from George Lambert, another Australian artist who he met on the ship going out from Melbourne to the UK. So yeah, and he went, while he was in Paris, he contracted tuberculosis and basically once he came home from overseas, he pretty much, he could only really had had access to his family and close friends as portrait subjects. And while this painting predates Ramsay's illness and Ramsay's time in Paris, its still, I think very sort of speaks, speaks very much to that kind of aspect of his practise and that very kind of intimate inflexion that's throughout all of his portraiture. And sad of course too, because once Ramsey came home with TB, Jessie, his sister, was one of his main carers. She nursed him. And so not only did Hugh Ramsay die at a tragically young age, Jessie contracted the disease from him and passed away too as a young woman. So incredibly powerful.
- And I think how Ramsay was 27 when he passed away.
- Yeah.
- And you just think about just how young and the quality of his youth, of his paintings just then and just the tragedy of passing it on to his sister and his carer. And it's just such a beautiful work and you just see in it so much.
- Yeah. Okay. Next one.
- Oh, this beautiful work. Naomi Hobson, "Warrior without a weapon." Now, am I correct in thinking that this is part of, "Inner Worlds, Outer Selves?"
- It is in that section of the exhibition. So we've got a section of the exhibition called, "Inner Worlds, Outer Selves". Guess there's lots of works in the exhibition which could fit into-
- I guess there's like many categories.
- Any number of different categories.
- I think when it was in Melbourne, we had it in, "Intimacy and Alienation", I think it was. But I mean, obviously things can have a natural fit in a number of different sections.
- Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think they fit both in either one really. But yeah, "Warrior without a Weapon" by Naomi Hobson is such a beautiful work which I really do think speaks very much to this idea of inner selves and outer world. So how we perceive ourselves, and then also how the world perceives us. And I guess, I think if we talk about it in a context of possibly a First Nation's perspective, we can also lean into this idea of double consciousness, where we've got how people view us and then how people or, how we view ourselves. And I feel like this work with Naomi is very much leaning into that, in this idea that it's really trying to challenge and it's really about the, challenging the negative portrayals of indigenous men through both a historical context, but also within contemporary media today. And what we have is this really beautiful and stunning portrait of a Coen community member. So Naomi Hobson is from the remote community of Coen up in far north Queensland up in the Cape area. And he is showing a real sense of vulnerability and a lovable sort of intimate approach to his personality. And not only that, but it also really positions again, and I guess like in terms of landscape too in place, it's really positioning him in the region of Coen in the Cape York area due to these flowers in his beard that signify sort of ceremonial act as well as that originates from that region. And I think it's such a beautiful, intimate portraiture, or portrait, sorry, also in terms of the relationships we have with artists and the sitter and collaboration was a big part of this portrait and of the series and then the way it came to fruition, understanding First Nations men's experiences of this negative stereotyping and hearing those stories and understanding how can we change that through a visual media, through portraiture and what maybe what does that look like? And I feel that this work really, really sums that up for me.
- Yeah, and for me, that whole sort of, one of the things that comes across really, really strongly for me in the exhibition and particularly I think with the work of some of the First Nations artists who are represented in the show, is the way some of the best works in the show are where artists have kind of reclaimed a visual code or a language in which case photography, which historically speaking initially was very much used to sort of document-
- Yeah.
- And classify First Nations people and these artists have really sort of twisted it and turned it on its head.
- Yeah. It's just a reclamation of that, of the gain of a tool that was used to continue colonialism really.
- Yeah.
- And reject ethnographic lenses, I suppose.
- And one of the, actually one of my favourite works in the, "Meet the Artist" section, is the Vernon Ah Kee.
- Oh, that portrait, yes.
- Which we haven't got a slide of unfortunately, but that's from the NGV's collection. And Vernon Ah Kee also from Queensland, you're probably familiar with his work, but he's made a number of these amazing portraits. They're like these huge drawings on canvas, they're so gorgeous. But based on anthropological photographs taken in the 1920's by a guy called Norman Tindale who basically photographed First Nations people as specimens and sort of divorced them completely from their identities and even their names. And it turns out that a lot of those people that Tindale photographed are Vernon's forebears, and in sort of recreating these portraits, including this wonderful self-portrait himself, he's kind of taken that very negative representation and reinstated, if you like, the sort of power of image.
- I think it gives a voice and an identity to a person that was nameless and that was historically being spoken for or being named and labelled. So there's a real power in that giving somebody back their identity. Yeah, absolutely.
- And then once again, we can't show them unfortunately for copyright reasons, but there's a couple of fabulous works by Tracey Moffat.
- Oh my goodness.
- The fantastic self-portrait from our collection and also that really fantastic picture of David Gulpilil from 1986. So this wonderful reclamation of a medium that was formerly used in very negative ways. Actually I think the Michael Riley is also a really good example of that. He's probably the next slide, I think.
- Oh it is.
- Yeah, this absolutely gorgeous photograph from our collection by Michael Riley. This one, the sitter's name is Maria, also known as Polly. She's Michael's cousin. They grew up together out in Dubbo in New South Wales. And when Michael became an artist he moved to Sydney in the early 1980's and started taking photographs. Maria was one of his models for a whole series of photographs that Michael took in 1986. And they included people like Tracy Moffatt actually, and a number of other First Nations women who've since become leaders in cultural spheres and all sorts of other areas. But this work along with others in the series that Michael created in 1986 were exhibited in this incredibly sort of seismic exhibition in Sydney called, "NADOC '86." And it really is an example, very similar to what Tracey Moffat was doing around about this time as well, where they've taken, once again, taken photography and instead of using it to photograph First Nations people in these very sort of static, very staged, very sort of artificial settings, just really show these people as these incredibly, amazing and powerful individuals. And there's just, this work is installed actually on a wall. There's a whole lot of women all just wearing some kind of a neck piece. We've got the Queen with her pearls. We've got the beautiful photograph by Atong Atem of Adut wearing a fantastic necklace. There's the beautiful breast plate. So it's just the whole sort of, the whole wall really kind of, oh and there's the one of Rubinstein as well by William Doubell, fabulous painting from the 1950's. So yeah, I think by stripping the images down and stripping them back and really focusing on one particular motif in the image, you get a really completely different sense of some of these works.
- Yeah, and we found in our hang of those works, we had the Queen, Polly Borland's "Queen" and Michael Riley's "Maria" next to each other and normally in NGV we hang everything at 1600, which is the tradition, you hang at the centre at 1600, that's where you get your line. Except we found, part of our reason for putting Michael Riley and Polly Borland's works next to each other was to be able to have this conversation about hierarchy and trying to, looking at the two necklaces together and trying to get rid of that. Except when we were installing it at 1600, the Queen's eyes actually sat above Maria's, which suddenly felt really like, 'cause they were right next to each other, we felt that we actually redid the hang to bring it up so their eye-levels were the same. And I don't think one person would've gone in and gone, "Oh, this way." But I think if we had have left it off, everyone would've noticed. But we had to bring it back up there just to like to, because the whole point was to level and then suddenly just because of the sizings, it came off and so that was that interesting thing which happens when you're installing an exhibition and when you're trying to make a point through a dialogue or juxtaposition between two works, having to actually reshape the way it was hung to actually get that vision across as well.
- So yeah, I mean we loved it so much in Melbourne that we repeated it.
- I think we're at 150, that's what we tried to put the centre of the works, at 150.
- We've got very high roofs.
- We have very high walls.
- Oh, and just for reference's sake, a lot of people will have seen the reproduction this work somewhere in the last few weeks for obvious reasons. But yeah, seeing this work by Polly Borland, the result of a shoot, a five-minute shoot that she had with Queen Elizabeth II at the end of 2001, seeing it next to the Michael Riley work is, it's really powerful. How are we going for time? I've completely lost track of time.
- Oh yeah. Well, how much time do we have? Two 40? We might move on to Vincent Namatjira maybe.
- Oh, yeah.
- Oh, sorry, I didn't introduce this theme, did I? This is called, "Icons and Identities", this section of the exhibition which is the largest section of the exhibition and I think one of the most powerful ones for me.
- Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, oh, I kind of like it all actually. It's hard to say. I like one and then I change and then I come back to it.
- [Joanna] There's lots of works in this section of the exhibition that I wish we owned and not the NGV.
- Very true, very true.
- Yeah, so we have Vincent Namatjira's work here. I find this work to be quite interesting actually, compared to a lot of his other works and his practise, particularly in terms of colour palette here. You know, he's so known for his vibrant and really rich and bold colour and works big scales and things, also always with a cheeky humour to it. But this work, it's in black and white. And again, the title of the work is actually called, "Australia in Black and White" and talking on our icons and identities here we, Vincent has, he's painted several people that are makeup I suppose. A lot of the Australian, or so called Australia's political landscape in some parts. So we have people like Pauline Hanson, Julie Gillard, we also have Cook among others, but then we've also, he's also sprinkled in other really significant figures as well. So we have Eddie Mabo and we have Adam Goodes and he is also painted in his great-grandfather, Albert Namatjira as well. And I think this idea of black and white and titling it, "Black and White", is this idea that there is a black and white history of Australia. And why do we talk about some characters or icons or identities within Australia, but maybe not so much others? And what does this conversation mean by having them altogether? And there's quite this sort of like, these are my heroes and these are my icons up against these other icons as well.
- [Joanna] And I think it's like Gina Rinehart as well.
- Yeah.
- [Joanna] You know, in dialogue with each other.
- Sorry, I guess again, with this humour, this wit to it. It's really quite an interrogation of black and white relations in Australia. And I think it's really quite clever using such a stripped back pallet to really just talk about, there are alternative narratives in Australia. There are different identities and different icons that make up what we know it does today.
- [Joanna] Yeah, and that's always the wonderful thing about Vincent's work for me is there's this kind of joy about it, he's laughing. But it's also really insightful.
- Politically engaged, yeah. All the time, yeah.
- It's fantastic. And that whole idea of icons, I mean the relationship between a national portrait gallery and the whole sort of idea of icon and iconography. It's what, one of the reasons why I love this section of the exhibition so much is once again, it really kind of does away with any sort of expectation that you might have.
- Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more with that, Joanna.
- Yeah, and likewise the TextaQueen work. This is another really favourite section of the exhibition. So there's the beautiful, once again, a kind of a grid of works by Julie Dowling. And then there's the Vincent Namatjira's and then there's this fabulous portrait of Gary Foley by TextaQueen, in which TextaQueen has asked, and it's part of a series once again, in Gary's case, he's called his portrait, "Creature from the Black Platoon". So it references, and this is a work which is very close to our hearts in more ways than one because the setting for it is just a couple of hundred metres away across King Edward Terrace, where the Tent Embassy is. And Gary Foley, of course, was one of the integral people to the foundation of the Tent Embassy in 1972. So you've got Mount Ainslie in the background. Yeah, it's a really fantastic work on multiple levels, but part of a series wherein TextaQueen invited their citizen, like I say, it's part of a series to kind of come up with their own B-grade movie language to tell their story and to present an aspect of their history and their identity as they wanted to be seen. And I love the fact that Gary Foley has chosen to portray himself as this kind of gun toting, ripped warrior against centuries of racial oppression. And there's that wonderful little sort of vignette underneath the text in the centre. It's a reproduction of a black and white photograph with a chap holding a placard saying, "Pardon me for being born into a nation of races." So yeah, it's a really powerful work and once again, I think another really wonderful and playful appropriation of an existing visual language that we turn into, the artist has used to very powerful but humorous and also very subversive effect. One of my favourite works in the collection, I think.
- Me too. It's so hard to pick favourite.
- And then that whole idea of iconography and dare I say the association of Australia with sport and we get a lot of people saying, "Oh, you know, where's Donald Bradman?" Blah, blah, blah. One of the, another of my favourite works in the exhibition and another work which I wish we owned and not the NGV is this.
- [Beckett] It is a spectacular work.
- Is this fabulous pot by Rona Rubuntja who's one of the artists working out of Ntaria or Hermannsburg, which of course is a recreation of the wonderful Nicky Winmar photograph from 1996. Beckett, you're the Melbournian so you'll be able to tell that story better than me.
- So the football match is, it's a first match of Geelong and St. Kilda playing each other since like the-
- [Joanna] Collingwood, wasn't it?
- Sorry, Collingwood and St. Kilda. And it was a Collingwood home game. And St. Kilda had beaten Collingwood the year beforehand at Victoria Park, or is the, I can't remember the ovals' names, but this was the first time it was on Collingwood's home ground. And St. Kilda had a pretty, there was a lot of tension in the crowd. And the final siren went, and St. Kilda had won. Nicky Winmar was near the Collingwood supporter area and suffered a tirade racial, just absolutely awful racial abuse and it was just horrific. And he stood there and he just picked, lifted up his shirt and started pointing at his stomach saying, "I'm black and I'm proud." And just the power of that and just Rona's recollections of it, you know. We all remember the day he did this. And David Hurlston, who's my former, who's retired now, who worked on the exhibition with us, he was at that match and-
- [Rebecca] Oh wow.
- You know, each time he'd speak about it, it'd just give you goosebumps and the power of what it meant to be there at that moment. But also what this work shows is how far we still have to go in our race relations in sport. You know, that's just, it was such a powerful statement, but we still have so much to learn. And this is also from a series of pots where she features First Nations AFL players and key moments in their career. And I think that there's about seven of them. And you get these moments and it gives a description of the player and that moment which happened and they're just beautiful things. And in particular, this one's just so powerful. Very lucky to have this one.
- Did you acquire the whole series?
- We've got, I think we've got seven.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Lucky.
- Well, I think that brings us to the end of our slides. Are we being given the-
- I would never do that to you, Jo. I could sit and listen to the three of you all day. That was fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you to our panellists today for joining us and for giving us such amazing insights into this new exhibition that we have on. Once again, I encourage all of our online audiences and our onsite audiences to pop into the exhibition. "Who are You?" is on display here at the Portrait Gallery until 29 January. Please hop on our website, portrait.gov.au to check out all of the things we've got coming up. I'd like to draw your attention in the online audience to another, "In Conversation." I think it's a hybrid. We can confirm or deny, there's a nod from the audience, another hybrid "In Conversation." So I'll get to massage the online audience and the onsite audience. Again, I'll get better at it, I promise. Another one happening on 3 December with Pamela See, who's an artist who does incredible paper cutting technique and her works are on display in the, "Who Are You?" exhibition as well. So please join us for that. It's 2:00 PM on 3 December. Hop on our website for more information, portrait.gov.au and follow us on social media at @portraitau. Once again, a massive thank you to our three panellists for joining us today and for all those incredible insights and to our Auslan translators, thank you so much for all of your efforts today, we really appreciate it. Thank you, please join us online again and please join us onsite again and we'll see you all soon. Thank you, bye-bye.
