Audio Transcript
My name’s Christopher Bassi. I’m a Meriam and Yupungathi man. I was born in Brisbane but my family’s from the Torres Strait. As a Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal person there’s a lot of complex issues that do come up when we think about our identity and our place in the world and our place in Australia. And so my painting practice allows me the ability to kind of explore some of those issues.
I’m sitting in front of an artwork in the collection called Black Palm. I created this work in much the same way that I create every work that I make. I suppose, you know, painting for me is something that I, I have to do. It’s sort of like a way of thinking through ideas. When I’m thinking about my heritage or my place in the world as a, you know a Torres Strait Island and Aboriginal person in Australia, it gives me that space, a kind of safe space to sort of figure things out.
So I look a lot at historical painting models, particularly European painting models and then I think about my own history, my own experiences and how I can use these models that already exist in a kind of western cannon. And so like I painted up a prop palm and I sort of dressed myself in black as if you know I was part of this Baroque lineage of painting. That’s something that’s important in my work is there’s a connection to me but there’s also a connection to sort of, something a bit broader as well, that history of painting. I hope people can look at a work like this and start to think about you know, the way that the world has been historically represented. You know, asking questions about “oh well who’s perspective am I looking at? What does this image try to tell me?” and not sort of take things for face value. And that’s kind of what the playfulness in the work does for me, it’s sort of like this idea that you know paintings are staged, images are staged. There’s always a perspective that’s trying to be told.
You know I was looking at these models of painting in western art history where you’d see these sort of grandiose portraits of people of power or of influence and when we come across an image like this and we sort of are, there’s a bit of a question mark moment trying to think about what this person’s trying to do or trying to understand. There’s a sort of tongue and cheek playfulness to it as well. It sort of unravels that sort of authority and it kind of makes it seem like, oh well its actually all just a big theatre production really. We all have stories to tell, we all have experiences and I think that painting or art in general gives us opportunities to think about our own, as much as we think about others.