Tag: Kluge-Ruhe

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Culture

Following curiosity

Students in sculpture and mindfulness courses combine efforts in an inspiring outdoor exhibition at Kluge-Ruhe. Supplied photo.

Feeling stressed? Suffering from pandemic anxiety? Need a staycation?  “Breathe with Me” offers a special respite.

Inspired by dadirri, the Aboriginal practice of deep listening, “Breathe With Me,” an installation at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, invites visitors to slow down, attune to nature, and connect with the salubrious qualities well known to Indigenous people and now embraced by Western medicine.

A collaboration between Kluge-Ruhe and the UVA art department and  Contemplative Sciences Center, the show pairs outdoor sculptures by students of William Bennett with reflective prompts composed by students in Jayme Siet’s Mindfulness and Nature course. Conceived during the height of the pandemic as a means to provide safe outdoor programming, the project is the brainchild of Kluge-Ruhe Education and Program Manager Lauren Maupin. 

“We knew that providing the UVA sculpture community with an extensive outdoor space to dream bigger with their sculptures would result in something unique and engaging,” says Maupin. The inclusion of the mindfulness/deep listening aspect dovetails neatly with the museum’s collection.  

The project also aligns with the COVID-19 policies instituted by UVA for 2020-21 that required all in-person sculpture classes to meet outside. Bennett points out that working outside also has particular resonance for this generation of students who “are passionate and concerned about the fate of the earth. This venture gave them the opportunity to work with the earth as material and to have the beautiful landscape of the Kluge-Ruhe museum as the context of their work.” 

The installation includes 13 site-specific sculptures positioned along a mown path in the museum’s backyard. The prompts, accessed by QR codes using Smartphones, are designed to guide viewers through a mindful engagement with nature.

Walking amongst the sculptures one is dazzled by the aspiration and obvious thought, care, and sweat equity that went into the works. “I believe that there is a strength and power that beginning art students bring to the table,” says Bennett. “Experienced commentators mentioned the ambitious plans of the young sculptors, who were unafraid and didn’t know what they could not do, so they did it.” 

Isabella Whitfield’s “Together Forever/Forever Together” features two parallel sets of stairs cut into the earth heading downwards in opposite directions. Even without the title, the piece suggests entrances to two graves. Descending into them is a little creepy and one gets a sense of entering into another subterranean realm. The perfect earthen steps are remarkable feats of craftsmanship. Piled behind the piece, dirt removed to form the holes speaks to the temporary absence of that volume and suggests that at some point it will be poured back into the holes. Surrounding the installation, six wood stanchions support a rope and also small pieces of wood engraved with poems by Maggie Weaver that ponder the shared fate of nature and humans. 

Two works, Addison Keatts’ “Ascension” and Sharon Chong’s “Me, Myself and You,” introduce the sense of smell with a heady perfume that emanates from the cedar used in their work. Keatts binds together scraggly branches to form a teepee shape. The viewer is invited to step inside the shelter and gaze out at the mountains and up at the sky through a perfect oculus. The piece was inspired by Keatts’ quest for a sense of home. Building it also gave her an outlet for the sadness and anger she felt about the death of a friend. 

Consisting of wooden planks sunk into the ground, “Me, Myself and You” forms a double spiral of 8-foot-high planks. Walking on the path between the planks is intended to be a contemplative experience—closed off from the outside world, one becomes more focused on the immediate surroundings. In the spaces between the planks one can see visitors walking on the other path within the shared solitude. 

Calista Rieken’s “Symbiosis” is a meditation on the interconnectedness of nature. Her figures of a deer and wolf mother and her two pups are faced with a veneer of bark, suggesting they are one with and reliant upon not only the trees—a couple of the figures emerge directly out of the tree trunks—but each other. 

Continuing the animal theme, UVA sculpture teaching and studio assistant Ed Miller’s “Earthen Bison” references the history of that great creature whose pre-18th century range extended as far east as Virginia. Constructed of earth, chicken wire, and straw, the animal has a head made of fired red clay. Positioning yourself with the mountains behind the sculpture, you can envision those long-gone animals in the landscape.  

Bennett’s “Omphalos/Oculus Looking in Seeing Out” features three dome-like structures: the dome of earth formed by the dirt removed to create the path; the concrete dome, a nod to Jefferson; and the stainless steel dome, which Bennett describes as “A curious observatory building where a participant looks in to the see the stars within the earth rather than looking out to see the heavens above.” 

Bennett points out that art by students rarely sees the light of day. “This was a chance for my students to make work that would have an audience, completing the gift exchange that is at the core of our art-making tradition.” “Breathe with Me” is indeed a welcome gift to a Charlottesville community emerging from the isolation of a pandemic.

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Arts Culture

PICK: Art in Life: Food

Publicity Photo

Plate as canvas: When Julia Child hit the airwaves as “The French Chef” in 1963, she single-handedly launched a cult of culinary celebrity that still inspires us to attempt complicated food preparations in our home kitchens. Art in Life: Food, the next installment of The Fralin Museum of Art and Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection’s virtual series, takes a look at the design and decisions around plating food in artful ways. The program covers “an intersection of food, art, and event production” and features special guests Arley Arrington of Arley Cakes, food stylist Elle Simone Scott, experimental psychologist Charles Spence, and Craig Thornton, chef at Wolvesmouth.

Thursday 11/12, Free, 7pm, Zoom required. kluge-ruhe.org/event/art-life-food.

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Culture

Pick: Roos Galore

Learn all about kangaroos in an online program via the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Image courtesy of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection

Hop on this: Are you curious about how long baby joeys stay in their mother’s pouches? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about Aboriginal art? In the webinar Roos Galore, Lauren Maupin and Fenella Belle focus on central and northern Australia for a comprehensive look at depictions of the beloved bouncer from down under in Aboriginal art. The online lesson is geared toward families, but all who want to know more about the culture of the kangaroo are welcome.

Thursday, May 28, 7pm; and Friday, May 29, 9am. Zoom registration required. facebook.com/klugeruhe.

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Arts

Star gazing: Brian Robinson at the Kluge-Ruhe

Mapping the Cosmos

Growing up on the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, Brian Robinson drew on walls, windows, the kitchen table, the back fence. “Pretty much everywhere,” he told C-VILLE last month. “That creativity continued to grow and flourish” over decades of art-making, says the artist, who is now in his 40s, and has works in major public collections all over Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia.

About a dozen of Robinson’s recent linocut prints and etchings are currently on view at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in “Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars,” through May 31.

Robinson, who is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia, says his works take a look “at life in the Torres Strait, with a bit of a twist.” He writes in his artist statement that these pieces “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture”—such as the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and the Tardis from “Dr. Who” in “Mapping the Cosmos” (above)—“are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination.”

The artist will be at the Kluge-Ruhe for the “Tithuyil” opening reception on February 20 at 5:30pm. —Erin O’Hare

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Arts

Birds of a feather: Barkindji artist Kent Morris looks to his past on Australian rooftops

Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5. Photo by Tom Cogill

Kent Morris stands in the lobby of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection with a big grin on his face. He’s just in from a birding excursion through Charlottesville-area marshes, and swiping through photos on his phone: here’s a few of a bald eagle, and a few of its nest. Here’s one of a native bird perched in a budding tree, and one of Morris himself, standing in shin-deep water, his digital camera slung over his shoulder.

Morris, a Barkindji artist who lives and works in St. Kilda, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, is in town for his photography exhibition “Unvanished,” on view at the Kluge-Ruhe through May 5. It’s his first full exhibition outside of Australia, and after showing a few more photos, he slips his phone into his pocket and heads into the gallery room.

Standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by colorful, geometric, symmetrical images, he asks if I know what I’m looking at. I do not.

“Birds on roofs!” he exclaims, his laughter echoing out of the gallery.

When I see it, I almost feel silly for not noticing it before—it’s right there.

Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Rainbow Lorikeet, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist

“I’m trying to make what’s unseen, seen,” says Morris. “Unvanished” is a story of journey and travel, of connections to country. It is a story of survival via forced adaptation, he says, a story of people whose cultures and histories have been wiped from the physical landscape and survived in objects (such as the shields Morris’ images reference) and in people.

Many Aboriginal language, tribal, and nation groups have strong connections to birds—spiritual, ecological—and with “Unvanished,” Morris adds one of shared experience. Like Aboriginal peoples, birds have been forced out of their habitats by Western culture and urbanization. They perch not on trees, but on roofs.

“We’ll start here,” says Morris, crossing the gallery to stand in front of “Barkindji (Bourke)-Magpie-lark,” an image of a black and white magpie-lark (or peewee) perched on a corrugated metal roof, a blue cable under its foot.

“This is shot on my country, on Barkindji country,” in what is now called Bourke, in the outback of northwestern New South Wales, says Morris.

The peewee is an important figure in the Barkindji creation story. Two traveling rainbow serpents knock the peewee out of his nest and chase him, and in their path leave two rivers, including the Darling River, the lifeblood of the Barkindji people.

While visiting family and walking Barkindji country, Morris spotted a peewee perched on the roof of the local bowling club, which has become a gathering place for Aboriginal peoples in the area. “It was a really classic moment, because, here is the creator, here now, on a contemporary place where we all gather and exchange stories and histories and meet to find each other,” he says.

Some of Morris’ paternal great great uncles and aunts were forcibly removed from their ancestral land by the government, placed on a truck and carted away; his father, like many other Aboriginal teenagers, was fostered by a white family. When Morris walks this land, he feels connected to it, and it pains him to see that there’s “really nothing to recognize” Aboriginal culture here.

Boon Wurrung (St Kilda) – Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist

What’s more, Western farming practices are destroying the Darling River. People today are not living in sync with nature, but we should reflect, deeply, on our relationship to the land upon which we live, and aim to live in balance with it, says Morris, explaining his use of mirroring and symmetry.

“Culture and knowledge has been, in areas, really fragmented and displaced,” he says, and his work aims to “piece it back together into something that is a whole.”

In another image there’s a blue-faced honeyeater on the roof of his sister’s house in Hervey Bay, in Queensland, on the land of the Butchulla people. The 10th image is of a corella on a roof in Broken Hill, the town where Morris’ father grew up. As Morris travels to maintain his ties to family, to country, he creates visible evidence to keep his culture strong.

Morris understands this duty as an artist, and as a Barkindji man. “You are part of something, he says. “You have responsibilities. Your ancestors are watching, your elders are watching.”

To people who have not been removed from their land or forced to give up their culture, the story Morris’ photography tells might seem remarkable. It is absolutely compelling, and Morris wants people to know it is not unique. It is imperative to acknowledge that this has been done not just to him and his family, he says, but to millions of people all over the world, including here in the Charlottesville area, where it happened to the people of the Monacan Indian Nation.

It is also imperative to acknowledge that many of these identities, these cultures, have not vanished. They have adapted, and art can be an easy way of getting people to begin to understand this.

“There’s a lot in these birds on roofs,” says Morris, his hearty laughter reverberating through the gallery. “I’m telling ya!”

Kent Morris’ “Unvanished” is at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection through May 5.

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Arts

Matters of the art: Going behind the scenes of local galleries and museums

Henry Skerritt, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, takes a look at one of the museums pieces.
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Arts

Living Picks: Week of July 18-24

Peach with leaf isolated on white

Food & Drink

Ol’ Fashioned Peach Festival

Saturday, July 21, and Sunday, July 22

Carter Mountain Orchard is hosting its eighth annual Peach Festival, complete with games, hayrides, food and a pie-eating contest for all ages. Free, 9am-7pm Saturday, and 9am-6pm Sunday. Carter Mountain Orchard, 1435 Carters Mountain Trail. 977-1833.

Family

Night at the Museum

Thursday, July 19

Enjoy food, beer and live music at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum. There will also be a kids zone, as well as the opportunity to explore exhibitions. $5; members free, 5- 9pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, 400 Worrell Dr. 244-0234.

Nonprofit

Cool Community Benefit Square Dance

Friday, July 20

Support the Rockfish Valley Volunteer Fire Department by doing your best do-si-do. Pay what you will, 7:30-10pm. Rockfish Valley Volunteer Fire Department, 11100 Rockfish Valley Hwy., Afton. 361-2470.

Health & Wellness

Families Run Together

Saturday, July 21

Come out for a series of morning running games with Ragged Mountain Running Shop. Both parents and children must participate. Free, 8- 8:30am. Brooks Family YMCA, 151 McIntire Park Dr. 974-9622.

Categories
Arts

First Fridays: June 1

Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s paintings, prints and one weaving are on view in “Ngerringkrrety: One Voice, Many Stories” at Second Street Gallery through July 27. Additionally, she and her son co-curated a current exhibition at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, “Ngunguni: Old Techniques Remain Strong,” and her work is part of “Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia,” at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., through September. Photo by Cassie de Collinge

The inspiration for many of Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s paintings lies in another art form: weaving.

At a roundtable discussion at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Wilson explains that her people, the Ngangikurrungurr, who are indigenous to Australia’s Daly River region, had passed on fishnet stitches from generation to generation, each community having its own special stitch. But over time, as whites colonized the land and forced the Aboriginal people to live on reserves and missions (similar to Native American reservations) with strict rules that in many cases aimed to dissolve indigenous cultures and traditions, many of those fishnet stitches were lost.

In the early 1970s, Wilson and her husband started Peppimenarti, a community for the Ngangikurrungurr people, with little more than a tent. They had to leave the mission in order to practice their culture, their art, their language, says Wilson.

Wilson, a master weaver, sought to revive the fishnet stitches her ancestors used. Carrying a photograph of her mother with a piece of fishnet her grandfather had stitched, Wilson searched for someone who could teach her that particular stitch. She visited many “very old” women before finding one who remembered the stitch. Wilson then painted the stitch onto canvas, brushstroke by brushstroke, ensuring that it would be visible and not lost again.

“It’s like a story that’s been there forever,” says Wilson’s granddaughter, Leaya. “It’s like putting a culture in a canvas, a painting—it’s strong.”

Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s work showcasing her Australian Aboriginal ancestors’ fishnet stitches is on display at Second Street Gallery. Courtesy artist

Second Street Gallery curator Kristen Chiacchia says that when most people think of contemporary art, they think of it in the Western tradition—abstract paintings, severe sculpture—but there’s more to it. Contemporary art “is art of our time, not art of a place,” says Chiacchia. It’s why she wanted to give Wilson’s work a solo show at Second Street Gallery and give Charlottesville the chance to see contemporary art that will challenge expectations.

Wilson’s work remembers the past in order to understand the present and a promise of the future. It’s there in the title of show, “Ngerringkrrety” which, Wilson explains, means, “from our ancestors, we hold it very strong.”—Erin O’Hare

First Fridays: June 1

Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St. “Striation Series: Brazilian Tides & North Shore Waters,” featuring intimate drawings and mosaic mirrors by Eileen Butler.

Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of works by Brigitte Turquois Freeman, Hannah Huthwaite, Mary Jane Zander, Carol Barber and Ted Asnis, through June 14. Beginning June 19, Alex Gould exhibits industrial and marine wooden sculpture.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Where We Belong,” featuring work by Judith Ely. Open June 9.

FF The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Redefining the Family Photo,” a group exhibition of photography that shows how the definition of family has emerged and morphed in our local experience of celebration, grief and protest. 5-8pm.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church. 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Welcome Spring!,” a multimedia group show of work by Buck Mountain Episcopal Church artists.

FF The Charlottesville Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. “Halcyon Explored,” featuring works from the Fiber and Stitch Collective artists. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “An Exaltation of Larks,” a group show including work by Cynthia Burke, Kai Lawson, Kathryn Henry Choisser, Aggie Zed and others. 5-7pm.

FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. Third-graders share artwork, poems and writing on local change-makers. 5:30-7:30pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “The Magic of Polymer Clay” featuring work by Judith N. Ligon inspired by the colors, textures and patterns of nature. Opens June 9.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Virginia’s Wild Things” featuring pyrogravure on leather from Genevieve Story. 6-8pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now”; “20th Century Still Lifes from the Permanent Collection,”  featuring the work of Picasso, Braque and Carrie Mae Weems, among others; “The Art of Protest”; “Reflections: Native Art Across Generations”; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 100 W. Jefferson St. “This is Charlottesville,” featuring new work from Sarah Cramer Shields’ photography and story project. 5:30-7:30pm.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. An exhibition of new work by Frank Walker that addresses the notion that black bodies are disposable and easily erased.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Beyond Dreaming: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States”; and “Ngunguni: Old Techniques Remain Strong,” an exhibition of paintings on eucalyptus bark from northern Australia.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “The Livestock Marker Show,” featuring paintings by Gwyn Kohr, Kathy Kuhlmann and Russ Warren that use livestock markers as the medium. Opens June 9.

Live Arts 123 E. Water St. “Conversations in Wood & Paint,” featuring new work from sculptor Alan Box Levine and painter Jennifer Esser. Through June 8.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Wax, Fire & Fungi,” a four-artist show featuring work made from transformed natural materials, in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Instinct” by Nancy Galloway and Joshua Galloway in the Lower Hall North Gallery; “Where We Live,” an exhibition of work about climate change by Jane Skafte in the Lower Hall South Gallery; “Little Creatures of the Mystery Woods and Other Works in Progress,” macro panoramic photographs by Aaron Farrington in the Upper Hall South Gallery; and Nathan Motley’s “George Harrison and Death Circa 1999-2010” in the Upper Hall North Gallery. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of acrylic paintings by Janet Pearlman. 5-7:30pm.

Noon Whistle Pottery 328 Main St., Stanardsville. “Color Concerto,” featuring the paintings of Diane Velasco and Jane Angelhart. Opens June 2.

FF Roy Wheeler Downtown Office 404 Eighth St. NE. An exhibition of work from Kailey and Melissa Reid. 5-7pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “Ngerringkrrety: One Voice, Many Stories,” an exhibition of paintings and weaving by Australian Aboriginal artist Regina Pilawuk Wilson. In The Backroom @SSG, a show of mixed media pieces by Sahara Clemons. 5:30-7:30pm.

Sidetracks Music 310 Second St. SE. “Bossa Nova,” featuring paintings by Jum Jirapan. June 2, 2-5pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. A members’ anniversary show judged by Leah Stoddard. June 2, 5-7pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Growers,” a show of collaborative works by Jeremy and Allyson Taylor that examines how humans interact with the natural world. 5-8pm.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “In the Land Where Poppies Bloom,” an exhibition by Golara Haghtalab featuring acrylic, spray paint and watercolor works on canvas that explore feelings of childhood nostalgia. 6-9pm.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. An exhibition of work by multimedia artist Emmaline Thacker. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “TRIO,” featuring three visually different, but thematically connected, bodies of work by Abby Kasonik. 5-7:30pm.

FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

Categories
Arts

Kluge-Ruhe holds up the mirror

Raymond Bulumbula is one of two artists who will travel nearly 10,000 miles in September to reconnect with artworks in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection that were collected from their community in the 1960s. Courtesy Kluge-Ruhe

Following last month’s local violence by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups, many people are speaking and acting out against racism for the first time.

But becoming an effective activist and ally to people of color requires humility, curiosity and ongoing education—which is why locals are lucky that a small building, perched on a picturesque hillside on Pantops Farm, exists in part to expose, explore and counter racism across cultures and generations.

That building is Kluge-Ruhe, the only museum in the United States dedicated to the exhibition and study of Australian Aboriginal art.

Curator and director Margo Smith oversees the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. Photo by Amy Jackson

In addition to exhibitions of paintings, photography, sculpture and mixed-media artworks from its extensive collection, the museum hosts Australian Aboriginal performances, workshops and artists-in-residence, including indigenous Tasmanian artist Julie Gough, whose exhibition, “Hunting Ground,” opens in early September. Gough’s work, which explores the absence of monuments and memorials to Australian Aboriginal genocide and massacre, typifies the cross-cultural dialogues the museum empowers.

As the Kluge-Ruhe staff writes in an open letter published on its website: “Indigenous Australians maintain that much of their history of invasion, subjugation and genocide has been covered up by settler narratives contributing to a national ‘amnesia.’ We Americans are also guilty of willful forgetting when it comes to our history.” By reflecting on international whitewashing, we can recognize our own legacies of discrimination and injustice.

Upcoming at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA

September 15-October 8: Northern Australian artists Raymond Bulumbula and Joyce Naliyabu visit Charlottesville to reconnect with artworks made by their grandparents. The exhibit offers a rare opportunity for the public to meet Aboriginal artists who are still steeped in their traditional culture.

October 27-November 19: Tasmanian artist Julie Gough will be in residence. Her artwork is about monuments and memorials to histories of violence.

Through January 7: Marine sculptures made by indigenous artists are on view at the science library at UVA to raise awareness about the damaging environmental effects of litter in the ocean.

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Arts

Artist Damien Shen finds motivation in his past

Artist-in-residence Damien Shen’s “Self-Portrait #2” is on display at Kluge-Ruhe through December 18. Courtesy of the artist

Like many creatives, Damien Shen spent most of his adult life focused on building a career instead of a formal art practice.

But in 2013, the South Australia native and current Kluge-Ruhe artist-in-residence realized he had a calling. He just needed to work out what it was.

“I did this journey down the east coast of Australia and went to pretty much every gallery in our contemporary space I could find in a two-week period,” Shen says. “I just needed to try and work out what it all meant to be an artist.”

A descendant of Ngarrindjeri and Chinese bloodlines, Shen was inspired by fellow Australian aboriginal artists Tony Albert and Vernon Ah Kee.

“When I saw [Ah Kee’s charcoal portraits], I was quite overwhelmed,” says Shen. “I just sat there in front of it and thought, ‘Man, this is amazing.’ I wondered if I could still draw, and if maybe I could draw like that. And I thought, ‘Maybe one day I can have my own exhibition.’”

Shen enrolled in a three-day charcoal portraiture workshop. On the third day, he received word that his aboriginal grandmother, Charlotte, passed away.

“That really was the catalyst to begin drawing a lot,” he says.

Shen focused intensely on developing his technique. Through drawings, paintings and lithographs, he committed to mastering a level of technical excellence that would allow him to break the rules. His first project focused on family genealogy, sourcing his maternal uncle’s and aunts’ memories as the last generation to experience growing up on Raukkan, a Ngarrindjeri mission south of Adelaide. Much like the American Indians, Australian aboriginal men and women suffered intergenerational trauma and cultural disenfranchisement under the colonial regime, including genocide, segregation, dispossession, marginalization and assimilation.

During his research, Shen discovered that the remains of more than 500 Ngarrindjeri people had been stolen by William Ramsay Smith, an Australian coroner, and sent to a scientist in Scotland for comparative anatomy.

“[Smith] used to go out and actually look for remains down near the Coorong,” says Shen. “There’s a lot of sand dunes and stuff out there, so the wind would expose parts of the grounds and sometimes expose remains. Other times he would dig them up. When he died in 1937, he had 182 skulls in his house. That was his own personal collection.”

Shen’s current exhibition at Kluge-Ruhe includes portraits of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as a portrait of Boorborrowie, a Ngarrindjeri man whose remains were later repatriated to Australia.

“I remember as a younger lad there was this event at Camp Coorong,” Shen says. “There was a ceremony and all these white crates. …Huge amounts of remains were being released by the museum in Edinburgh and brought back to South Australia.”

In addition to showcasing precise and fluid portraiture styles, Shen’s exhibit “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body” references 19th century scientific anatomical renderings of the human form. The show’s titular work echoes an illustration from Andreas Vesalius’ medical book, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). The text is an apt reference point for Shen’s themes, as its clinical accuracy objectifies the physical body much like colonials, coroners and scientists dehumanized Australian aboriginal men, women and their remains.

Shen’s etching reclaims this spirit by inserting Vesalius’ version of the male form into a natural landscape and superimposing iconic Ngarrindjeri body designs, ritualistic paraphernalia and the face, hair and beard of Major Sumner (a Ngarrindjeri elder and Shen’s Uncle Moogy) in ceremonial dress.

In his series, “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body—Volume II,” inspired by Irving Penn’s ethnographic photography, Shen sought to create a studio scene that combined hero shots with behind-the-scenes candids of himself and his uncle painting in the traditional Ngarrindjeri way. “These are images that could have been shot back in the 1800s but they were done a couple of years ago,” says Shen.

He wanted, he says, to highlight the tension between gazing in and observing a culture, “this part of Australian culture that is lost and I believe struggling to stay alive,” and the contemporary reality of cultural preservation and revivification.

“It’s very difficult to understand unless you’re from those areas that have been able to hold a cultural practice through time,” he says. “All we really have are old photos and illustrations by guys who were traveling through in the 1800s.”

Shen says the experience of actually painting his skin for the first time was surreal—and very intimate.

“It’s not an initiation,” he says. “I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like that. For me, it meant a lot to be able to do it with Uncle Moogy.”

Shen sounds surprised that The National Gallery of Australia asked to acquire these intimate moments. But these photos, in addition to his first volume of work, earned him an avalanche of critical acclaim. In just two and a half years, the artist has been featured in 30 exhibitions around Australia, and he’s won multiple accolades, including the 2014 South Australian NAIDOC Artist of the Year Award, the 2015 Prospect Portrait Prize and the 64th Blake Prize for Emerging Artists in 2016.

Shen’s current residency at the Kluge-Ruhe is also his first.

“So many times in the last three years I’ve been pinching myself,” says Shen. “You win an award or you get accepted into a residency or this and that. Like, ‘Wow, this is the artist’s life.’ It doesn’t always go your way, but today I have this incredible view [of Charlottesville]. I have an atrium I can call my studio for the month. I’m incredibly blessed.”

Contact Elizabeth Derby at arts@c-ville.com.