Dreamtime

Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art from Yuendumu

Bush Carrot and Seed Dreaming (Ngarlajiyi Manu Parnarntjarnyi Jukurrpa) by Jorna Napurrurla Nelson, acrylic on linen, 48" x 30"

The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens its new exhibition, Dreamtime: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art from Yuendumu.

In its new exhibition, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center departs temporarily from its Northwest focus with art from the other side of the planet. Dreamtime: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art from Yuendumu provides some exciting impressions of a vital art movement that has flowered among Australia's indigenous peoples over the past couple of decades.

On any given January day it might be 103º in Alice Springs in the middle of Oz's bone-dry Central Desert and 33º in Port Angeles. The warm and vibrant colors that run wall-to-wall in this collection of two dozen canvases from the Warlukurlangu Artists Association, provide a welcome splash of summer heat from the Land Downunder.
"Acid greens and bottomless blues, bubble gum pinks, fiery reds and oranges, and opalescent lavenders evoke the marbleized rainbow that glows in the Australian desert after a rare rain," said PAFAC director Jake Seniuk, who worked with the Jeffrey Moose Gallery of Seattle in organizing the exhibition.

"But color is secondary to the bold linear patterns," Seniuk observes. "The elemental vocabulary of dots, dashes, concentric circles and wavy lines that Aboriginal artists use to build up their abstracted landscapes manage to be geometric and organic at the same time. They are essentially maps inspired by the Dreamtime and carry on iconographic traditions tens of thousands of years old."