Reflection about Art Gallery

On Tuesday EAP 2014 class went to Art Gallery excursion. The first piece of contemporary art was painted by Lin who is Aboriginal artist which it’s called fruit bats. Fruit bats are made up of a flock of fibreglass sculptures of hundred bats, decorated with crosshatching and hanging on a Hill Hoist clothes lines. Beneath this icon of Australians suburbia are wooden discs with flower like motifs, representing the bats dropping. The fruit bats symbolise of aboriginal people story in the past and can interpret the content differently by different people. Hill Hoist represent white people are who proud of themselves. The fruit bats mean white people cut all the entire trees for different purpose such as for agriculture, city and houses. Therefore, indigenous people stuck in people backyard and hang on their trees. Furthermore, they are crowded in small areas and have no facility to reside because their lands have been taken by others. Moreover, the dropping bats symbolise the mess that white people created to aboriginal people. The second piece of art introduced by another lecturer which it painted by Albert Namatjra based on Western traditional style. His paintings are not in the highly symbolic style of traditional Aboriginal but focused on landscape where the ancestors created the lands, trees and water poles. His arts represent his stories, experience and identity. Although his painting concentrated on traditional style, the material that he used for his art was contemporary. Finally, there are also another traditional aboriginal art which painted by Uta Uta Tjanagala. His art design symbolise Tingari ceremonial. According to Sally Cullen explained the painting represent ancestral activities over a huge area of the western desert. Each concentric circle symbolise a geographic site of Aboriginal people. The lines that link the circles site symbolise the travels of Tingari ancestors. The artist strongly focused on traditional painting style by used acrylics for his artwork even though the material that he applied for his painting was contemporary.