- Hi, my name is Tony Albert,
and I'm here at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
in front of my work Projecting our Future.
Projecting our Future is the third installment
of a three-part trilogy.
As the final piece, projecting our future looks at
our discussion, an Australian discussion, I guess, about,
not in the past, in the present, but the future of
Australia and indeed, more so with our race relations.
I came from a painting background and the ephemera
and the imagery on the objects was starting to creep into my
paintings with kind of a natural progression to a point
where the ephemera became the work itself.
Very early on it was important to me to actually find
the objects myself and know that I had collected them,
but as my work, I guess, has become more familiar
with the public and the art community I find a lot of
people are giving me kind of things now and,
I'm at a point also where that's kind of okay as well,
I feel fine now if someone gives me something but,
I think most people have memories of this kind of,
now discarded ephemera being on the family wall at
some point in time.
Being on grandma's wall.
Most certainly I have memories from childhood.
This idea of things hanging and things being projected off
the wall, you know was something that I wanted to do.
The use of the mirrors was really important to
me with this third piece that the
viewer actually became part of the work itself.
This circular target motif I think
is a reoccurring symbol to me.
I love the circle not only as a simple abstract
kind of shape but, you know the representation
of the target,
very much in the central image,
there's a sense of an eyeball,
the resonating circles within a speaker.
And the other kind of symbol that I like to use a lot is
this cross kind of figure which,
is representative of a cross boomerang
from the rainforest in
North Queensland where my family is from and,
I think a lot of the times I also try to challenge the idea
of what is Aboriginal art.
There's this perception of dot art being Aboriginal
and even in a traditional concept,
my people never ever did dot paintings.
But if you go up to Cairns or North Queensland,
every souvenir shop you come across has,
you know these amazing dot paintings but they've
got no relevance or meaning to the people of that area.
The alien is actually a word or terminology
quite often used within an Aboriginal context.
The term alien itself means anything foreign,
so for alien and Aboriginal to be, you know,
part of the same sentence actually doesn't make a lot
of sense at all but,
I've always thought of myself in some ways as an alien.
The other love is just for the other
and the pop culture alien itself,
you know I really loved alien kind of science fiction
and the mysteriousness of the outer worlds.
So most of my collection at the studio is in large boxes and
I try to keep it as orderly as I can, you know to use but
with a work like this I start just,
you know sifting through and you know, finding key images.
In all the works, especially when I'm using
the kitsch Aboriginalia,
I try to find common linkages or
reasoning behind using it so
with another work Headhunter
in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection,
was primarily just the use of heads within the images.
And something that I do at the studio is kind of
break down or categorise things,
and it can change from day-to-day.
So one day I might put all plates together,
another day put all ash trays together.
I guess as an avid collector of this kind of
iconography and then the way in which I transform it and
use it I very much see it as a reclamation
of the objects and giving them a voice.
It's really funny I...
You know I say they already have a voice but
you know I'm just like this vessel in kind of
bringing that out.
And quite often,
before I go to bed I sit an object on
my dresser table like beside my bed
and like almost sleep with the object and usually
in the morning I kind of have this understanding
of the text.
The collection grew from a child, and this kind of
kitsch ephemera was you know very inexpensive
and very accessible to me as a young person
and it did grow from a very innocent collection
or a love for the kind of iconography,
but it wasn't until I was a teenager I became a lot more
politically aware of the kind of imagery
and what it actually represented.
I guess the gaze of Aboriginal people
within Australia from a Western viewpoint.