Black Sky Collisions

Saturday 11 February, 3-7pm

We invite you to join artists and Traditional Owners to examine the works in the exhibition and discuss the issues they address.

“Make noise with your art not with your mouth”

Joseph Williams Jungarrayi

Black Sky is about forceful impacts – metal to rock, wings slicing through air, heels to earth, paint landing on canvas. Emerging from the provocations of the Black Sky exhibition, Black Sky Collisions is a day for artists and Traditional Owners to gather together, to re-examine the works in the exhibition, and to discuss the urgent issues that enshroud them.

Black Sky is an exhibition that encounters unexpected spaces of resistance and excess, taking as its starting point the idea of different skies as spaces of Law, story, politics, ecological upheaval, sovereignty, and imagination. Black Sky Collisions is a day for us to gather and relate through overlapping agencies and affinities – from visualising the effects of mining on Country, to making artistic work in different creative forms, to practising forms of continuity and innovation with living cultural archives.

Under a Black Sky

3–5pm, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery Roundtable 

With bothGobawarrah-YinhawangkaTraditional Owners and Tennant Creek Brio artists in town, we will gather together at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery for conversations between local and visiting artists and thinkers – traversing issues of sovereignty, solidarity, cultural continuation through colonial rupture and resource extraction, and future visions guided by overlapping skies.

Speakers include Rupert Betheras, Michael Bonner, Eleanor Dixon, Lévi McLean, Curtis Taylor, Roy Tommy, Barry Ugle, and Julie Walker.  

Open Studio Party

5–7pm, UWA School of Design

Open studio for artist-in-residence Jimmy Frank Japarurla

Sundowner with musical guests David West with Cohen Bourgault.

Jimmy Frank Japarurla specialises in traditional carving, drawing from materials that come from two worlds, Warumungu and Colonial. His works comment on the violation of land, culture and custom inflicted by mining and other heavy industry, both in the past and present.  His works show that these two worlds can be reconciled, but not without acknowledging the significance of the Warumungu connection to culture and country, and the fraught history of post-contact relations in Australia. He learnt to carve while he was growing up out bush by watching his elders, including his father, Jimmy Frank Senior, and his renowned uncle Day Day Frank. “I do it a little different to them”, explains Frank, referring to the contemporary influence on his practice. Frank has a great knowledge of and respect for natural materials and cultural heritage, as well as for the symbolic power of the wreckage of mining and its left-over debris, which he utilises to critique the impact of colonisation on both wumpurrani (Indigenous) and papulanji (non-indigenous) worlds as they collide.  

Campus Partners: UWA School of Design and the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies

Drinks Sponsorship from Shelter Brewing Co.

------------------

Image: Joseph Williams Jungarayi and Lévi McLean, Walala-ka (The Hunt), 2020, film still, 1:20 mins