Contributors
Una Rey
Tarntanya / Adelaide, Australia
Una Rey is an artist, academic and curator born in Sydney in 1970. She spent several years in northern Australia, completing a Fine Arts degree in Darwin in 1995. She has extensive experience across the Indigenous art sector, managing high-end commercial art galleries and remote community art centres at Haasts Bluff, Milikapiti (The Tiwi Islands) and Balgo.In 2006 Una relocated to Newcastle completing her PhD in cross-cultural narratives in Australian painting in 2009. She is a full-time lecturer in Art History and related disciplines at The University of Newcastle and her work on Australian contemporary art and Indigenous art in particular is published regularly in catalogues, journals and news media. See her staff profile, University of Newcastle, for a list of publications.
Articles
Like genealogies, archives hold and hide information. They ask as many questions as they answer. In 2011 in Artlink’s Beauty + Terror issue, Daniel Browning profiled Ben McKeown’s practice when, as an emerging artist, he was awarded the Victorian Indigenous Art Award. The work in question Untitled (2011) presents a strong young man in a singlet wielding two hardwood fighting boomerangs. His Aboriginality is inferred, but his personal identity is deftly masked by the weapons. There is a sparring session underway, a flirtation, a provocation, a staging in which humour and menace play equal parts. The image entreats interpretation and deflects it. As Browning wrote, its ‘enigmatic, a question mark. But what is it trying to say?’...
