OPENING NIGHT:
5.30PM FRIDAY 22 MARCH 2024
6PM WELCOME TO COUNTRY by AUNTY ANNETTE KELLY, ARAKWAL ELDER OF BYRON BAY.
EXHIBITION TALK & TOUR: 2PM SATURDAY 6 APRIL 2024 More info>
Unfinished Business is an exhibition by local artist David Morgan that seeks to raise questions about Australia’s great unfinished business. How can we address the on-going injustice of Indigenous dispossession and all the ills that accompany this history?
The aftermath of the ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum has left a void in which efforts towards reconciliation between First Nations Australian and non-indigenous Australians struggle to find traction in public debate or personal discussion. Morgan’s approach to this dilemma is to seek to provoke thought, rather than to tell an explicit story or propose a specific remedy. He hopes that the works will prompt viewers to reflect on how and where they position themselves in relation to this issue.
Morgan creates work that draws upon his family’s settler history – his mother’s circumstances as a settler on a newly designated farmstead in central NSW and his father as an ‘everyman’ during the changing policy landscape of the first half of the 20th century.
He uses photographs from time spent in remote Indigenous communities and images of the colonial history of Bundjalung Country. He also references the convict era in Australia as a way of contextualising the early colonial experience.
Unfinished Business is presented with permission from Arakwal, Minjunbal and Yaegl of the Bundjalung nation and from Yolngu of East Arnhem Land and Marrungu of the Pilbara, for the use of images over which they have cultural authority.
BIO
David Morgan, based in Bangalow, has worked as a practicing artist since 2010. His work is inspired by his experiences in Indigenous communities and his deep concern for fostering reconciliation with First Nations people.
He studied art at Caulfield Technical College in 1967 and then worked at the National Museum In Melbourne where he designed displays of Australian Indigenous cultural material.
In the 1970s he worked in the remote Indigenous community of Milingimbi in Arnhem Land. He first worked as an Art and Craft Advisor then, in 1974, he joined the newly established bilingual program at Milingimbi School. He used his skills in graphic design, photography and printing to train Yolngu literacy workers who were preparing teaching and learning materials in the Gupapuyngu language. He later worked in a similar role at Strelley School, an independent Indigenous school in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
He then moved back to the Northern Territory to work at Batchelor College (an Indigenous tertiary college). He taught graphic design, photography and poster / book production. During the 1990s he completed a Masters in Education and developed innovative teaching and learning materials in the emerging field of computer-based education.