Brenda L. Croft, Irrisistable/Irresistible from the series, fever (you give me)
Brenda L. Croft
1964-
Gurindji/Mudpurra
Date
2000
Medium Specific
Ilfachrome print
Classification
Photograph
Dimensions
23 1/2 x 16 in. (59.7 x 40.6 cm)Framed: 32 x 24 in. (81.3 x 61 cm)
Accession Number
2009.20.10.28
Credit
Gift of the artist
Memo / Artist Statement
“This body of work, comprising digitally manipulated images, text and soundscape has been developed over three years, conceived during the artist’s residency at the Australia Council Greene Street Studio in New York and created in Perth and Sydney. The sense of travel informs much of the work; hard to locate, links to place, strands of time. Diluted by the filter of popular/populist/revisionist story telling. The making of new, invidious (urban) myths.
Irrisistable was the name of one of the first ships that arrived in Australia after 1788. Irresistible is also how the first arrivals considered Indigenous women.
Bado: water is what many of those sick with small pox cried out for, as their throats constricted and the fever struck them, until they became weaker and weaker and died.”
Irrisistable was the name of one of the first ships that arrived in Australia after 1788. Irresistible is also how the first arrivals considered Indigenous women.
Bado: water is what many of those sick with small pox cried out for, as their throats constricted and the fever struck them, until they became weaker and weaker and died.”
Biography
Brenda L Croft has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since the mid-1980s and her work is held in numerous major public institutions and public collections. In the series ’fever (you give me)’, Croft presents digitally manipulated images, text and soundscapes, drawing on corrupted versions of sanitized (white washed) stories. This series examines the impact of non-Indigenous culture on the Indigenous cultures of Australia and the Americas. Croft uses a layering of text and images taken from both historical and contemporary sources to question stereotypical descriptions of the first point of contact and ensuing relations between Indigenous & non-Indigenous cultures.