Outback: C, 2005
synthetic polymer paint on 54 canvas boards (no. 76222-76275)
228.6
x 213.4
cm
SOLD
Provenance
Sherman Galleries, Sydney
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005
Exhibited
Imants Tillers: Land Beyond Goodbye, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 20 October – 12 November 2005
Literature
I. Tillers, Imants Tillers: Land Beyond Goodbye, Sydney, exh. cat., illus.
Outback: C appropriates a found object composition by the Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-99). From the 1980s, Gascoigne began using discarded reflective road signs to create cross-word-like parquetry grids. Atop this original image, Tillers has written place names in a column from 'Faraway Bay' to 'Bendigo', a list that bisects the country from the Kimberley to Victoria. Around the edge of the canvas in blue are the word "A throw of the dice will never change history", a play on the famous phrase "the die is cast" that impliedly comments on the way in which Aboriginal history cannot be changed or erased by the new names of European colonialism. The work is made from small numbered canvasboards, a decades-long project known collectively as 'The Book of Power', an unapologetically political, emotive project.
Reflecting on his Outback series as a whole, Tillers has said: "The Outback paintings refer to the spiritual heart of Australia and my imagined relationship to this 'unsolved' heart, for I was born in Australia and Australia is my homeland. The names of towns and localities present in many of these works, like William Creek, Lake Eyre, Broken Hill, Coober Pedy, Kata Tjuta, Kununurra and Faraway Bay, I use as a kind of readymade poetry. They are also places I have visited on my 'unfinished journey'."
The work in the Outback series expresses "certain ideas about the Australian landscape. In this guise I am following a powerful, distinctly Australian theme that stretches across time, from the work of Eugène con Guérard, John Glover, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts to Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams, Rosalie Gascoigne, John Olsen, Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye. One could add the late works of the important conceptual artist Ian Burn to this landscape trajectory in Australian art." (Imants Tillers, Blairgowrie, Cooma, 30 August 2005 in Imants Tillers: Land Beyond Goodbye, Sydney, exh. cat.)
Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney