JGM Gallery presents Revelation & Concealment, an exhibition of paintings and prints by 18 Indigenous Australian artists. The starting points for this exhibition are the dual themes of “revelation and concealment” in Indigenous contemporary art, a dialectic which curator Stephen Gilchrist identifies in his 2016 analysis of Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi’s Children’s Water Dreaming (1972) (Gilchrist, 2016).
The tension between these polarities is often manifest in the relationship between abstraction and realism. Indeed, a great strength of Revelation & Concealment’sexhibiting artists is their capacity to reconcile these two approaches, which they achieve using a variety of formal innovations.
In Jennifer Ingkatji’s Seven Sisters Story, the narrative of its Tjukurpa (“Creation Story”), which tells how the Pleiades cluster came into being, is not articulated sequentially. Instead, the painting gives an impression of creation through Ingkatji’s auratic sprays of dotwork. Superimposed over a preliminary layer of paint, these dots dazzle the viewer, suggesting fields of energy emanating from astral beings, or the clarity of constellations against an abyssal night sky. However, this dotwork also slightly obscures the composition below. Thus, while impacting the viewer in a manner akin to the experience of revelation, Ingkatji’s dotwork can also be seen to function as a mask, concealing the forms beneath.