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Michael Riley: sights unseen
by:
Brenda L Croft
Wiradjuri/Kamileroi artist Michael Riley (1960-2004) was one of the most important indigenous visual artists of the past two decades. His film and video work challenged our perceptions of indigenous experience, particularly the most disenfranchised communities in rural and remote eastern Australia which he brought to the forefront of international contemporary art. His work gained increasing critical acclaim in the early twenty-first century, highlighted by his selection for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. His work has been selected as one of eight artists who will be represented in the significant Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the new Musee du quai Branly, due to open in Paris in June 2006.
Riley's work draws on both European and North American traditions, as well as his indigenous heritage in Australia. He studied film-making and photography and is concerned by the contradictions imposed by European beliefs on the indigenous people in Australia. His early photographs are imbued with an aesthetic beauty, and his subjects possess a sense of dignity and grace. The black-and-white portraits, with their sensitive styling and ambient lighting, are the very opposite of the gritty, socio-political documentary style that emanated from the Black Power and indigenous self-determination movements of the 1970s and eighties, often taken by non-indigenous photographers.
These sensitive, informed portraits of families and communities are the antithesis of the bleak photojournalist studies of contemporary Aboriginal life in towns and cities favoured by the media. There is an obvious warmth between subject and photographer. It is evident that the photographer knew his subjects well and shared their experiences. Throughout all Riley's work is a sense of exploration, of using the media of film and photography to represent the diverse aspects of contemporary Aboriginal life accurately and to get away from the stereotype of the drunk in the streets or marching in protests, and not being involved in everyday life.
Michael Riley was born on Talbragar Mission outside Dubbo, in western New South Wales, but lived in Sydney from the late 1970s. He was represented in the first indigenous photographic exhibition, Aboriginal and Islander photographers, held at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney in September 1986. In 1987, with nine other Sydney-based indigenous artists, he founded Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, a seminal force in the contemporary indigenous visual arts movement throughout the 1990s. A number of his films and photo-media work won major national and international awards. Riley's work is also represented in various major public and private collections throughout Australia, and his early black-and-white photography is highly sought after by collectors.
His first conceptual body of work was the languidly beautiful series of fifteen gelatin silver images comprising Sacrifice, 1993. It is in this series that the symbol of the cross - that most potent of Christian icons - first appeared, looming large
against a turbulent sky. Christianity is a subject to which Riley returned again in later work, such as the series flyblown, 1998 and the video
Empire, 1997.
Riley's images reflect what he has described as the 'sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian'. They resonate with loss - experienced not only by the individual, but by entire indigenous communities - loss of culture and land in an enforced or sometimes embraced exchange for Christianity. Biblical elements abound in Sacrifice: the cross laid on the chest and standing out sharp against the sky in an unseen cemetery; the shimmering skin of the fish in stark contrast to the parched earth on which it rests; the oozing liquid in the dark palms of the black Christ-like figure evoking his struggle on the cross; and the granules of sugar, flour and coffee echoing the rations meted out to Aboriginal people on missions and hinting at the struggles present-day communities face with the onslaught of drugs.
In early 1998 Riley was diagnosed with renal failure and this debilitating illness impacted on his professional and personal life. Riley's last and most significant body of work, 'Cloud', 2001, shifted from terra firma to other worldly locations, including the paranormal. The dream-like quality of the work is evoked by the seductive, digitally manipulated images of the Magritte-like bovine seraph from the Mission as it floats in mid-air against a background of clouds; the flight of the boomerang (or barrgan/balgarrn in Wiradjuri), which is echoed in the wings of the angel, its back turned to the viewer, face averted; and again in the splayed wings of the blackbird, the eaglehawk or crow, and in the crucifix-like span of the native galang-galang, or locusts' wings. There is irony and wit in this image.
Michael Riley: sights unseen reveals the prolific talents of a quiet observer whose photomedia works that include images being reworked on a computer then printed in a diversity of formats, video and film continues to have a profound effect on contemporary representation and comprehension of indigenous Australia. The exhibition draws together a comprehensive body of work, chronicling a period of intense cultural development and achievement. Alongside Rileyￕs well-known work will be images previously unseen in public.
A full colour monograph is published to accompany the exhibition.
Michael Riley: sights unseen will
be on show at the National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra,
14 July - 16 October 2006. |
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Figure 1
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