- A big part of my practise is based around a collection of what I call Aboriginalia, which is kind of, like kitsch Australiana with images and representations of Aboriginal people.
My name is Tony Albert, I come from Far North Queensland. My people are Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku `Yalanji I've been living and working in Sydney for the past eight years, and I'm a resident at the Carriageworks Artist Studios in Redfern.
I grew up in a very modest family. We didn't have a lot of money at all and secondhand shops were really a part of life, and that is were I came across this kind of discarded ephemera, which, for me, was really representational of my family and people in my life, and I loved seeing Aboriginal faces emblazed upon things, like household kind of kitsch, so, I would collect it, as a child, and display it in my room. It was a collection that was built out of love.
It wasn't until I was in high school, that I started to really understand a lot more about this kind of imagery, and in turn, the more kind of sinister notions attached to it, why it was no longer collectable, why people actually had a problem with those images and I was looking at other Aboriginal academics, artists and writers, that really inspired me to delve much deeper into the idea of what this ephemera, what Aboriginalia really was.
The cards are really interesting, because they have the Aboriginal image emblazed on one side, and then the other side is kind of this complete opposite, it's the idea of the monarchy, it's the idea of a hierarchy, it's the idea of a class system, it's the idea of chance, it's the idea of luck attached to card games, and when you use the card within the structure, in a card tower, it also creates this tangent, or this fractured possibility, that it could fall at any point in time, or, stabling itself in a very fragile manner, which I think, is very interesting in the way in which the conversations with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, the politics that is happening, the representation of the way in which Aboriginal people live in society, I think, is very reflective of this balancing act, and the opportunity to be involved in The National, and to expand on my practice, meant I could make the card tower at a quite monumental scale, but to also meant, I had the opportunity to pull back and minimalise the idea of these two conversations, which are now represented through colour, that being of the white inside of the card, and a black outside of the card.
I think, a lot of my work is really about planting a seed in someone's thought, it's about creating a very simple entry point to a discussion, and it might not necessarily be there and then, that that hits home to the viewer, but it might be that evening in bed, or week later, when something gets seen on the TV, or read in the newspaper, that they could come back to that thought and that idea, within the artwork, and think, oh, that's what that artist was talking about. So, I kind of see my work as this catalyst for that conversation.