CLINTON NAINA (formerly NAIN), The Old Rugged Cross, 2003

CLINTON NAINA (formerly NAIN) Meriam Mir/Ku Ku languages, born 1971 The Old Rugged Cross, 2003 acrylic and varnish on canvas 152 x 121.5 cm; 152 x 121.5 cm; 50 x 50 cm signed verso 'Clinton Nain', 2003; stamped verso Sherman Galleries Paddington PROVENANCE Karen Brown Gallery, Northern Territory, Cat No. KB2004 Sherman Galleries, New South Wales Private Collection, The Netherlands Accompanied by the documentation from Karen Brown Gallery EXHIBITED The Dirty Deal Ain't Clean, 2005, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, New South Wales Clinton Nain, 2003, Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin, Northern Territory Across both panels of blacked-out canvas, Clinton Nain scribes the full text of the hymn into the surface in a faint, unsteady cursive, the lines "On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame" and "I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day" barely legible against the dark ground they are cut or dragged through. The choice of this particular hymn is not incidental: "The Old Rugged Cross" was a staple of the missions that administered Indigenous communities throughout the twentieth century, and its presence here functions as a found object as much as a text. By rendering lines such as "stained with blood so divine, a wondrous beauty I see" nearly unreadable, Nain reverses the hymn's own rhetoric of redemption through suffering, turning its promise of salvation into something closer to erasure. Born in Carlton, Melbourne, in 1971 to Eleanor Harding, a Torres Strait Islander political activist descended from the Meriam Mer and Kuku peoples, and a father of Danish and Irish descent, Nain was carried to his first land rights protest at a month old and to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra on Australia Day 1972, an initiation into political life that runs through his subsequent practice. He graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1994 as its first Indigenous Fine Arts graduate, completing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 2003, the same year this work was made. He is the brother of famed artists Destiny Deacon.

Utropspris:SEK 24,203.77

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