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Reko Rennie 2014 No sleep till Dreamtime (detail), birch plywood, metallic textile foil, synthetic polymer, diamond dust, gold leaf. Courtesy of the artist and Blackartprojects
Exhibition
Reko Rennie: No sleep till Dreamtime
28 Jun 2014 – 30 Nov 2014
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- Art Gallery Rd
- Sydney
New South Wales - 2000
- Australia
Travel Information
- Bus 441: departs York Street side of Queen Victoria Building on the hour and every 20 minutes during the week and every 30 minutes on weekends and public holidays, and drops off right outside the Gallery.
- St James and Martin Place stations are both about 10 minutes walk.
No sleep till Dreamtime takes its cue from the Beastie Boys single 'No sleep till Brooklyn’.
About
'As an urban Indigenous Australian, my work often references the hip-hop and graffiti subcultures that were influential on my artistic practice in my formative years’, says Reko Rennie, a Kamilaroi artist based in Melbourne. 'In this work I have merged traditional Kamilaroi diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity.’
Rennie’s art explores issues of Aboriginal identity within an urban environment. Largely biographical, his commanding works combine the iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti and street art. Rennie’s current regalia feature heavily in the exhibition – the Aboriginal flag, the crown and the diamond – as a way of both asserting and questioning the sovereignty of Australia. The exhibition builds on Rennie’s ongoing quest to remember the past to better understand the present and work towards a different future.
