Aboriginal Women In a Dream State
Friday, July 21, 2006; Page WE23
When my son was 3 or 4 and we'd take long car trips, he'd often ask me to pass the map to him in the back seat when I was done, whereupon he'd study its strange squiggles and contours intently and at length without saying a word.
I'm fairly certain that he had no idea what anything he was looking at meant. He couldn't yet read, let alone read a map (as evidenced by the fact that he would sometimes hold it upside down). Yet there was something compelling about the information contained on the page -- for information it was, even if it was unintelligible to him -- that kept him in its thrall, even beyond comprehension.
  Emily Kame Kngwarreye's 1995 "Anooralya (Wild Yam Dreaming)," part of "Dreaming Their Way." (Seattle Art Museum) |
I have a feeling that my son's early engagement with maps is not that far afield from what the average viewer will experience upon encountering much of the work in "Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, along with a related exhibition, "Painted Stories: Contemporary Paintings by Australian Aboriginal Women," at the Embassy of Australia. Undeniably compelling at times, both shows are packed with pictures whose symbolism is not easily interpreted by those outside the culture in which they were created.
Yet, as the title of the first show overtly suggests -- and as its wall labels make even more explicit, in a reference to "mythical maps" -- there is, in a lot of these images, a sense of finding one's way, a sense of place that is at once physical and metaphysical, as though the paths through the countryside they often suggest are situated as much in the dimension of time as in space.
The connection to the earth is, of course, pretty hard to miss. It's there in the warm reds, ochers and yellows that call to mind the Australian bush and in the expanse of wind-washed dunes suggested by Kathleen Petyarre's "Thorny Devil Lizard Dreaming (after Sandstorm)," a powerful canvas at the women's museum that works both as expressionist abstraction and literal landscape. And it's there in a series of paintings of leaves by Gloria Tamerre Petyarre, Kathleen's "sister" (the word may or may not refer to a blood relationship, we're told). Two examples of this subject are on view at each venue, and they are among both show's standouts, in the way they capture a sense of movement, calling to mind not just a gentle breeze, but the anima that breathes through all life.
Does it really matter that many museumgoers will not be able to decode the significance of the various sacred sites depicted or the specific iconography often employed? (Shapes that evoke parentheses, for example, traditionally stand in for overhead views of women -- digging for bush potatoes, gathered at campfires, etc.) Does it matter what mythological role, in Emily Kame Kngwarreye's "Hungry Emus" for instance, the titular animal played in the Dreaming, an Australian Aboriginal concept loosely defined as a kind of creation myth, possessing, somewhat paradoxically, both a past and a present component? Or does it matter that the various dots of color scattered throughout Kngwarreye's quasi-pointillist painting represent wild tomato, bush plum, bush orange and a bush medicine called anorangait and are not merely chosen for their harmony of design?
Not really, I'd argue.
On one level, the works in "Dreaming Their Way" and "Painted Stories" don't need to be explicitly read, even if it is their artists' intent to encode meaning. Thanks at least in part to the Washington Color School, we're already a city that's comfortable looking at dots, stripes and washes of pure color, without narrative. That there often is a narrative embedded in these paintings -- albeit one in a language most of us don't speak -- should not be enough to prevent our enjoyment of them.
That's because of what I'll call, for lack of a better word, the holistic nature of many of these works, a nature that transcends the often minutely specific cultural circumstances and symbolic meaning of their creation to speak to larger, more universal concerns.
Look at, say, "That Day: painful day," by Rosella Namok, an artist represented at both venues with powerfully rhythmic canvases that allude to sky, water, sand and, yes, the body. More important, though, than its evocation of the material world, the darkly disturbing "That Day" seems to tap into a world of hurt that is both within and without all of us.
How should anyone of us be expected to relate to kangaroos or emus as our spiritual ancestors, especially if we've never seen one, except in a zoo, and if we've heard no stories involving them as we were growing up? If, on the other hand, we can place them in the same metaphorical context as, say, E.T. (yes, the extraterrestrial of movie fame), as artist Linda Syddick (a.k.a. Tjungkaya Napaltjarri) does in "ET Going Home," then maybe we can see that the feeling of connection to the land, to the sky and to what lies beyond is not so foreign after all.
DREAMING THEIR WAY: AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL WOMEN PAINTERS Through Sept. 24 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW (Metro: Metro Center). 202-783-5000. http:/
PAINTED STORIES: CONTEMPORARY PAINTINGS BY AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL WOMEN Through Sept. 1 at the Embassy of Australia, 1601 Massachusetts Ave. NW (Metro: Farragut North). 202-797-3383. http:/
Public programs associated with "Dreaming Their Way" include:
Sept. 16 from 10 to 1 Role model workshop with Australian Aboriginal singer-songwriter Kerrianne Cox. Reservations required.
Sept. 17 from 1 to 4 Family festival.
Sept. 18 at 7 Concert by Australian Aboriginal singer-songwriter Kerrianne Cox. $10; students and seniors $8; members $7. Reservations required.
