Undoing the Colonial Gaze: Ambiguity in the Art of Brook Andrew

Abstract

The colonial archive’s store of ethnographic images was a rich source for Australian Indigenous artists in the 1990s. The archive is dangerous territory as the images therein form an integral component of the project of colonialism itself. Indeed, it was an awareness of this power of the image and its role in the construction of “Aboriginality” that provided the motivation for artists such as Leah King-Smith, Fiona Foley and Gordon Bennett to return to the archive. One strategy they adopted in their appropriation of historical imagery was to recontextualise ethnographic photographs, and the circumstances of their production, within narratives of dispossession. King-Smith’s series, Patter..