16 & 17 SEPTEMBER
16 & 17 SEPTEMBER
Vernon Ah Kee is a founding member of proppaNOW, a leading Aboriginal Arts Collective in Queensland. His work has been collected, exhibited and acquired both nationally and internationally international museums and galleries. Vernon is a conceptual artist with drawing at his core. He works across Video, photography, sculpture, installation and drawing. Ah Kee fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary black/white political issues to expose degrees of underlying racism in ‘Australian society’.
Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.
Ah Kee’s work has been exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions, including ‘Revolutions: Forms that turn’, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); ‘Once Removed’, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2009); ‘Ideas of Barack’, National Gallery of Victoria (2011); ‘Tall Man’, Gertrude Contemporary (2011); ‘Everything Falls Apart’, Artspace Sydney (2012); ‘unDisclosed’: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial’, National Gallery of Australia (2012); ‘My Country: I Still Call Australia Home’, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (2013); and ‘Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art’, National Gallery of Canada (2013).
