CASE STUDY

Tony Albert

 

Tony Albert was born in Townsville, North Queensland in 1981 and holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Queensland College of Art.  He works in a number of art forms, including drawing, painting, photography, and installation. A founding member of Queensland’s Indigenous art collective proppaNOW, his art explores political, historical and cultural issues relevant to Indigenous people in Australia today.

 

Tony Albert’s ASH on me, 2008, demonstrates how colonizer paraphernalia can be used to create a powerful, politically astute artwork. ASH on me is an installation composed of found second hand ceramic and metal ashtrays and black vinyl lettering. The ashtrays are adorned with kitsch images of Aboriginal people and culture. Each ashtray offers a different representation of how Aboriginal people were perceived, some as caricatures, some realistically. Albert’s use of these objects crowded on to the vinyl black word ‘ASH’ stresses their initial purpose: for cigarette butts to be stubbed out on the faces of the Indigenous people depicted. Albert has cleverly transformed the kitsch, tasteless ashtrays into oppressing symbols of racism.

 

Even though the ashtrays belong to a different period of time their use in the artwork has a great contemporary resonance. Today still, images of Indigenous people and their cultural objects are used and misused on mass as symbols of present-day Australia.

 

Artist quote:

“Ash on me is about having a cigarette put out on you. It’s politically charged and everything… there was something so sinister about an ashtray that I felt needed a work of its own. I put all my ashtrays aside and thought, ‘I’ll just keep collecting ashtrays’. I was saving them up for something special …”

 

The black Vinyl lettering “ASH on me” is very similar to the text seen in Richard Bell’s work and consequently the Western text based art of the 1980s. Like these works, the use of a direct statement is provoking, reinforcing the idea of the colonizer stubbing out their cigarette on the Aboriginal people. ASH on me also suggests the black skin colour as dirt or a stain on the otherwise pristine white of Australia, a repeated idea throughout contemporary Indigenous art and culture.

 

For more information on ASH on me visit:

National Gallery of Australia, Tony Albert, ASH on me