Vernon Ah Kee is an Australian Indigenous artist whose work explores Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture and issues facing Indigenous culture in a post-colonial society. He creates sensitive charcoal portraits of his family that were inspired by anthropological photos from the early 20th century, addressing the underlying racism. In later works, he focuses on his subjects' gazes to make the viewer feel uncomfortable and reposition Indigenous Australians as modern people rather than objects in a museum. His text-based works reveal the discrimination Indigenous people face in everyday life.

2. Vernon Ah Kee’s
Artistic Practice
Ah Kee‘s artistic practice is informed and produced within the
urban context from Aboriginal experience of contemporary life.
His work explores Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous
culture in contemporary society.
Vernon Ah Kee creates work dealing with issues facing
Australian Indigenous culture in a post-colonial society.
His art is primarily a critique of Australian popular culture,
specifically the Black/White divide.

3. Fantasies of the Good
series (2004) MCA

5.  Ah Kee‘s installation of 13 sensitively-
drawn charcoal portraits of
family, relatives and ancestors from
Palm Island, Queensland, were
inspired by the photographs of
Norman Tindale, an anthropologist
who documented Aboriginal people
from all over Australia from the 1920s
to the 1960s.
 "There was an anthropologist who
went around Australia to Aboriginal
communities from the 1930s to the
1960s, who was basically
documenting the dying species," he
says. "So he was recording them and
giving them number classifications
and things like that.”

6.  After requesting photographs of his
own family from the collection of the
South Australian Museum, Vernon Ah
Kee began to make sensitive
drawings from these photographs,
emphasising the eugenicist
(yoojanist-ways of improving human
by selective breeding) subtext of the
original photographs.
 While a valuable record, particularly
of the connection of Aboriginal
peoples to specific lands, the
photographs also infer a degree of
underlying racism present in
Australian society, a subject that Ah
Kee regularly addresses in his
drawings and text works.

7.  This is reflected in the off - centre composition of Ah
Kee‘s drawings. The artist‘s cool, precise drawing style is
also suggestive of the ways that art (and especially
photography) is able to aestheticise or manipulate the
truth of situations, although the piercing gazes of Ah
Kee‘s subjects provide a subtle yet deliberate measure of
directness and emotional intensity.
• The facial resemblances in
these compelling portraits
suggest an ongoing familial
connection, reaffirming the
artist‘s place within the group
and anchoring his position in
the world. This genealogical
study of the men in Ah Kee‘s
family is a visual record of the
solidarity, continuity and
endurance of a single family
and, by extension, of
Aboriginal culture.

8. Gaze series (2008)
Biennale of Sydney

9.  In 2008 Vernon Ah Kee exhibited in
the Biennale of Sydney a series of 12
charcoal and pastel drawings on
canvas that continued his series of
portraits of his family.
 The focus of each subject is their
gaze, the way they look back at the
viewer. This is designed to cause the
viewer to feel a sense of discomfort,
as the confrontational act of the
stare is strongly felt.
 As previously, the drawings are a
response to the anthropological
romanticised historical portraits of
Aboriginals and effectively
reposition the Aboriginal in Australia
from something that is in a museum
to modern day people living real and
contemporary lives.

11.  The Brisbane artist used the photographic records as a basis of Gaze,
a series of drawings prepared for the Biennale that recasts his
grandparents and great-grandparents as beautiful - and human -
subjects of portraiture in Australian art.
 "[I want to] remove ideas of the noble savage and the exotic other,
'cause I want these people to be people, and to be deep-thinking,
intelligent, emotive, complex and all the things that other people
are allowed to be except for black fellas," he says.

12. Unwritten (2010).
Charcoal on paper.
 A small series in response to the death in police custody of a young
man, Mulrunji, on Palm Island in 2004. The apparent police cover up
and protection of their own lead to accusations of racism, riots by the
Islanders, and their further oppression by the police.
 The faces conjure not only from the 2004 Islanders, but of the haunting
history of racism and oppressions that have gone back through the
generations.

16. If I Was
White
(2002).
Inkjet print on
polystyrene board
on polyvinyl
chloride
(238 x 137cm)

17.  If I Was White comprises a
set of 30 small texts with
the title, If I was White. The
text-based installation
speaks directly to a white
audience through an
(invisible) chorus of black
voices.
 One reads, “If I was White I
could walk down the street
and people would pay no
particular attention to me.”
Beneath, in smaller text, Ah
Kee expands on this matter-
of-fact observation: “White
people in particular have
little understanding of
Whiteness even though
every White person in the
country is an experienced
practitioner.”

18.  Black people however, do
have some understanding of
‘Whiteness’.
 This text continues for the
entire page, and another,
and another. In this fashion,
Ah Kee turns the notion of
extremity into a stream of
thoughts and observations
that becomes a river.
 This text-based installation
work reveals and condemns
the widespread and
inescapable discrimination
and racial stereotyping that
Indigenous Australians have
experienced since European
colonisation and continue to
experience in everyday life.