Gordon Bennett
QLD 1955-2014
Rivers Run Red (Memory of a Tree) c.1990
Acrylic on linen
183 x 182 cm
BCEC Art Collection
Rivers Run Red (Memory of a Tree) belongs to a body of work Gordon Bennett completed in the early 1990s, in which the artist appropriated the ‘drip-painting’ style of famed American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Bennett chose Pollock’s style to critique the myth of the heroic, white male artist; but also, because Pollock himself was influenced by Navajo sand painting. Throughout his career, Bennett often re-appropriated traditions, ideas, designs and objects appropriated from First Nations peoples and cultures. Here, Bennett also employs fields of dots, evoking the Western Desert painting movement, but uses the dots to build pointillist landscapes, highlighting his interests at the intersections of cultures and traditions.
In Rivers Run Red (Memory of a Tree), Bennett combines these styles to build an Australian landscape, dominated by a dead tree in the foreground. A red river runs across the top right half of the composition, which speaks to a history of violence experienced by First Nations Australians as a result of European colonisation in the eighteenth century.
Rivers Run Red (Memory of a Tree) can be viewed on Plaza Level.