Dear Primitive : black bodies as decor. 27 October – 13 November 1994. Temple Studio, Macquarie Street & St Edmonds Road, Prahran.

Prahran, Vic. : Temple Studio, 1994. Quarto folding card (290 x 210 mm), printed on [4] sides, illustrated; very good condition; invitation to exhibition opening loosely inserted.

‘”Dear Primitive” quite deliberately takes popular “Aboriginalia” imagery of the 1950s-60s (the stuff of kids’ books and wall ceramics) in order to expose it, in the psychic sense, as a “white” familiar. It engages racist images in order to see not whether but how the stereotype speaks. At issue here is the coy way white hegemony decorates its own social surface with black bodies in various appealing arrangements – social narration presenting as sheer visuality….’ (From the catalogue essay by Ross Moore, artist and collector of Aboriginalia).

It is interesting to read a white artist and collector’s take on the politics of “Aboriginalia”, written years before Tony Albert made the art world familiar with the term.

Trove locates only two copies of this exhibition catalogue (NLA; SLV)