Australia's flag has as much to do with contests as with consensus. The original design resulted from a 1901-2 competition sponsored by a tobacco company.
Trademarks and logos have been vital ways of marketing goods and services for well over a century. What are the readily identifiable symbols for Australia?
Eureka - the First Australian Republic? was a touring exhibition which documented and interpreted the Eureka stockade. Containing paintings, drawings and prints ranging from the 1850s to 1994 as well as objects, documents and books related to or dealing with the Eureka Stockade the exhibition demonstrated the symbolic power this event has exerted on Australian political life as well as the imagination of artists.
Re Affiliations
12 June - 13 July 1997
Margaret Sanders, Claudia Lünig, Clare Martin, Hanh Ngo, Maria Stukoff, Lisa Jeong, Paloma Ramos, Madelaine Neveu
Nexus Gallery, Adelaide
Post colonialism provides a chimerical hope of a different means of shaping and ordering public representation of Australia, bu the institutional discourse around post-colonial arworks tends to uphold the status quo by using race/ethnicity as another means of directing scorn towards the lower reaches of Australian society.
When a nation puts out a stamp design it reveals a great deal about its official ideology. The designs which appear on stamps of countries which achieve independence and become republics follow a curious pattern. From France through Tsarist Russia to Libya.... what will Australia put on its Republican stamp [if and when it becomes a Republic]?
In Australia, the land has been, for non-Aboriginal settlers, from the beginning a sign for the nation and for the manufacture of livelihood (the sheep's back, mineral wealth) as well as a repository of dreams and misapprehensions. The importance of the land to Aboriginal Australian ought to be easy for us to comprehend.
Flags are vexing (vexillological) by nature. Explores the role of flags and the ways they have been subverted, with recent exhibitions recognising their irony and employing ideas that unpick the ideological rhetoric stitched into these symbols.
Mapping the Comfort Zone: The Dream and the Real
works by Irene Briant, Jenny Clapson, Jo Crawford, Christine James. Catherine K, Nien Schwartz, Lucinda Clutterbuck & Sarah Watt.
Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre
4 July - 16 August 1997