Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery is proud to present two solo shows of work by Rosella Namok and Arone Raymond Meeks.
This will be Rosella Namok’s first Sydney exhibition since it became her exclusive Sydney representative, with the closure of the Hogarth Galleries. Coo-ee is also proud to announce that this will be the first exhibition of Arone Raymond Meeks’ work outside Queensland in over ten years.
Coo-ee warmly extends an open invitation to join them on the opening night of this exhibition, the 2nd of June to meet the artists and to view the works of two of Australia’s most promising talents.
Rosella Namok:
Namok, whose works first appeared on the contemporary art scene in the late 1990’s, is the most successful of far North Queensland’s renowned Lockhart River ˜Art Gang’. Her paintings revolve loosely around several narratives of her social, physical, and natural, environment. They feature events such as hunting and fishing expeditions, weather patterns of rain and wind or the traditional stories of Kapay and Kuyan, the two opposing moieties that govern marriage relations in her Ungkum community.
Her distinctive technique imparts a ˜modern’ style. Using a rubber thong, palette knife or her fingers she strips back layers of wet paint that have been built up one above another. In this way serendipitous effects are created as the different layers subtly affect each other and refine inherent opposites. In Namok’s ˜rain paintings’ shifting scapes of water and land reflect the volatile nature of the tropical weather in her country and evoke the mood during the wet season, when sheets of drenching rain and annual floods close the roads for up to five months.
Arone Raymond Meeks:
Born in Sydney in 1957, Arone Meeks (of Kuku Midigi heritage, from the Laura region in Cape York, FNQ) grew up in Cairns before returning to Sydney to attend art school. He became a founding artist of the Boomalli Aboriginal artists collective in Sydney in 1983 and was the first indigenous Australian to be awarded a residency at Cite des Arts in Paris. Upon his return Meeks lived in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and was represented by Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery between 1988 and 2001. He participated in prestigious exhibitions in Portsmouth, Glasgow, Lyons, Toulouse, Kyoto, Tokyo, Boston and Santa Fe; published books; and held regular solo exhibitions in Australia. Following the death of his long-time partner, he returned to live in Cairns, and, since then, has rarely exhibited outside of Queensland.
