Crossing Cultures

The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art

Danny Gibson Tjapaltjarri, Pintupi, born 1976

Adapting the geometric designs associated with the journeying of the Tingari Men, this work deliberately evokes the ceremonies that these ancestral figures performed while traveling across the sand dunes of the vast Western Desert. In the lower right-hand side of the painting, the optical designs seem to collide and fold into one another, drawing the viewer into a liminal space between the worlds of the tangible and the spiritual. While the painting refuses figurative imagery, it nevertheless communicates the potency of Ancestral presence to both an initiated and non-initiated audience and demonstrates a cultural imperative to safeguard these sites and their associated narratives.