In YOU ARE HERE, Therese Ritchie examines Australia’s frontier wars and the massacre of Indigenous peoples alongside the nation’s history of coal extraction and infrastructure development implemented by European settlers, mining companies and successive Australian governments. Ritchie’s evocative use of visual digital imagery – much of which is appropriated from familiar historical Australian paintings of landscapes and events commemorating the arrival of European’s in Australia – is overlaid with text and timelines that account for a litany of events, misdemeanours, atrocities, discoveries, manoeuvres and ploys that lead us to this culminating moment in Australia’s history. YOU ARE HERE prompts the need for wider conversations about truth-telling, care for the country, the future of mining and issues of sovereignty in 2021 and is accompanied by a series of engaging public programs.
Therese Ritchie is an alumna of CDU and an accomplished and committed Darwin-based artist whose art is socially engaged. CDU Art Collection holds the largest collection of Ritchie’s artwork in Australia, some of which was featured in the exhibition Not Dead Yet, a retrospective exhibition of Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty, presented at CDU Art Gallery, 2010. YOU ARE HERE is curated by Dr Joanna Barrkman, Curator, CDU Art Collection and Art Gallery. YOU ARE HERE is supported by a COVID-19 Response Grant, Arts NT, Northern Territory Government.
10 June to 17 July 2021
Artist’s Floortalk: Saturday 19 June 2021, 11am-12pm.
Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Casuarina, NT 0810, Australia
Wed-Fri, 10am-4pm
Sat, 10am-2pm
For more information and for a complete listing of associated events, see https://www.cdu.edu.au/artcollection-gallery/artgallery.
