The National Gallery of Victoria’s Marking Time: Indigenous Art from the NGV can now be explored online through their website due to the coronavirus outbreak closing their physical gallery.
Like many art shows forced eerily empty, The National Gallery of Victoria has been flexible to allow its audience return remotely from the comfort of their couches. Marking Time opened in August of 2019 and will be available online until June 14, 2020. By clicking through the gallery, viewers can still get a sense of walking through the gallery, as well as panning the room from a central point to get a sense of the gallery as a whole instead of just as individual works. The exhibition labels are also provided online.
The gallery “looks at the persistence of images, signs or text painted or drawn on a range of surfaces in Indigenous Australia, from ancient times until now.” -National Gallery Victoria
Beginning with a room of markings on rock faces, you move through time as you move through the exhibition. The more modern portion of the exhibition with bright neon designs and inclusion of street art adds to a bold, animated cultural expression. The second and final rooms both contain collections of work by large groups of people - the former, Warlpiri senior men in 1986, the latter, Warlpiri women in the same year for children at Lajamanu school - with homogenous styles to create unified sets. The online format makes it difficult to sense the textures of the works or experience the gallery lighting, but the colors and shapes within the works are still remarkable. The backgrounds are colored by textures of tiny circles of paint, usually white contrasted against a dark board, accompanying much larger colored shapes and lines. The shapes and lines are curved with few sharp corners, aside from a few small jagged triangles and arrows. They give the impression of looking at cells through a microscope, which unconsciously adds to a sense of unity on biological levels. There is a strong use of primary colors, and many have contrasting colors like orange and blue or red and green, but with somewhat muted tones to bring a calming harmony to them.
The pieces throughout Marking Time are individually striking, but as a set they embody a fuller dynamic and spirited energy, because together they capture elements that cannot be included in each individual piece. The introductory information discusses the themes of both reclaiming identity and the theme of the “socially fragmenting effects of colonization” in both urban and traditional settings. These ideas come across well in these pieces that hold up as captivating even without their background context. This lively exhibition will only be more energized when it can be filled with a curious audience once again.