Growing up at Blood Alley, a fringe camp on the outskirts of Geraldton, Brian McKinnon witnessed the effect of several generations of assimilationist government policies on Indigenous people. Children like Brian were corralled and defined along lines of half-, quarter- or eighth- caste, in a program to merge the races in a gradual whitewash in which Aboriginality would slowly disappear. Liaisons between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people were strictly forbidden – their progeny an ‘accidental’ race, often the result of sexual violence. As a result, Brian McKinnon, an artist of the Yamatji/Amangu people sees himself as an ‘accidental man.’

If government policies threatened the continuity of Indigenous culture, the work of Brian McKinnon has been a defiant attempt to reconstruct Indigenous identity. In many of his early works, this was achieved using a process of bricolage that utilised a range of found materials. For McKinnon, bricolage was a process of alchemy through which identity could be created from precisely those materials discarded as ‘waste’ on the personal and geographical fringe.

Whilst his newer works have moved away from the use of found materials, they have adopted a form of aesthetic bricolage, appropriating a diverse range of imagery and styles. Ancient Sumerian and Indigenous designs jostle with more recent imagery borrowed from Ellsworth Kelly and Emory Douglas. Although this may seem a chaotic jumble of signs, there are no accidents here. Each disjunction has been carefully orchestrated to create a subtle discourse on the nature of self-representation. This ‘quiet’ meditation is often overlooked in McKinnon’s work, largely as it is hidden beneath the artist’s uncompromising political messages. And yet, it is here that McKinnon’s work places the greatest challenge to the viewer.

In The Art of an Accidental Man, McKinnon exhibits two series of works produced between 2008-9. The first are coloured in a distinctive palette of red, green and blue – a schema borrowed from Ellsworth Kelly’s classic 1963 colour-field paintings. McKinnon appropriates both Kelly’s palette and hard-edge technique, but reassigns both with his own personal meanings. The red, blue and green become symbolic of ocean, blood and land, while the hard-edges of colour take on the role of ‘the physical and mental barriers’ that enclose Indigenous experience on the fringe.

McKinnon’s appropriation also makes a pointed aesthetic critique, holding Kelly’s work as symptomatic of the cultural imperialism of late-modernist abstraction. In a tacit subversion of this power, he overlays these abstractions with a range of imagery that points towards the history of ‘Black’ representations. These include ancient Sumerian amagi symbols, tribal Indigenous designs and images taken from the political posters of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas.

In overwriting Kelly’s work with that of Douglas, McKinnon makes a pointed reference to the supposed post-colonial victory of ‘Black’ representation. Kelly and Douglas are used to signify the two dominant strains of 1960s art – the first, the detached, exclusive, imperialist mode of modernist abstraction, and the latter, the more socially engaged, inclusive, activist artforms that arose around the Gay, Feminist and Black Power movements. By sweeping aside the dominance of modernist abstraction, these activist forms were the precursor to the post-colonial inclusivity that set the preconditions for the triumph of the Indigenous art movement.

As much as Brian McKinnon draws sustenance from the example of precursors like Emory Douglas, it is a pained nostalgia filled with the knowledge that little has changed. Despite the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s, Indigenous Australians face many of the same challenges they face forty years ago. In a cruel irony, McKinnon’s work S.O.S (save our soil) appropriates Black faces from Douglas’ 1968 poster Revolution in Our Lifetime. But McKinnon’s painting offers little of the redemptive hope of revolution. Instead, it points to the failure of reconciliation “Sorry Not F_C_N Good Enough Mr Kevin F_C_N Rudd”, the work declares, “The Amangu Want Their Land.” As Emory Douglas’ faces peer forth in demand of revolution, they have not lost any of their revolutionary zeal, but in McKinnon’s work, this is tempered by a deep, resigned sadness, their eyes heavy with entropy of change.

This critique reaches its zenith in McKinnon’s most recent black and white works – as though echoing Douglas’ 1970 dictate that revolutionary art may “use any media you please as long as it is black and white.” In one of McKinnon’s most powerful works, Committed, five black canvases are chained together in a clear reference to Indigenous chain gangs. Written across the canvases: “Being Different The Only Crime.”

Beyond a purely physical sense of persecution and bondage, Committed suggests that Indigenous representation remains constricted by the preconditions of imperialism. In the top left corner, McKinnon plants a single yellow dot, wryly noting that “all ‘authentic’ Aboriginal art must have dots.” By literally chaining his canvases, McKinnon suggests that despite the apparent success of the Indigenous art movement, Indigenous representation remains controlled by the mechanisms of the market and western colonialism. Where ‘difference’ was once a crime, Committed suggests that it has become enchained, commoditised and brought under control. Rather than a liberating force, art becomes merely another form of Indigenous imprisonment.

The political messages of McKinnon’s work are clearly designed to shock and startle. But beneath the loud, clear statements, his works reveal a deep sadness at how few people are prepared to hear this call, to listen to this voice. From bricolage to appropriation, they signify a continuing journey to find a unique voice – one that might speak free of colonial chains. In 2009, Brian McKinnon was a finalist in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Indigenous Art Awards.

Mossenson Galleries are pleased to present Brian McKinnon: The Art of an Accidental Man. The exhibition will be opened at 6pm on Tuesday 15 September 2009 by Associate Professor Angela O’Brien, Head of Creative Arts, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. The artist will be present for the opening.