EXHIBITION INFO

Patternation was a collaborative installation project by artist Reko Rennie, curator Stephen Gilchrist and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia, USA. The mixed media installation questioned notions of cultural invisibility, national identity and public surveillance. Sampling Aboriginal symbology with secular imagery, it embodied the easy duality of contemporary Aboriginality. The title Patternation refers not just to the repeated geometric patterns that often appear in Rennie’s work, but also to the rhetoricized and contrived “patter” of national discourse regarding Indigenous people which promises so much, but enacts so little.