One too many 2022

Content from UpNext.com.au. Please don't scrape website.

Artists from Itlja Ntjarra: Benita Clements, Selma Coulthard, Dellina Inkamala, Delray Inkamala, Dianne Inkamala, Vanessa Inkamala, Reinhold Inkamala, Mervyn Rubuntja, Betty Wheeler, Marcus Wheeler with special guest Chips Mackinolty.

One too many is one in a series of de-colonising exhibitions and projects presented by the powerhouse Itlja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art Centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Albert Namatjira's watercolour heritage and Central Australia's blindingly glorious landscapes are celebrated or are carefully overlaid with images of modernity or juxtaposed with subtle manifestos. One too many opens a window onto the rivers of grog that blight lives and litter landscapes.

The exhibition's opening scene is an installation of flattened beer cans, wreckage collected from beside the road between Mparntwe and Ntaria (Hermannsburg), a former Lutheran mission. The road to old Hermannsburg mission and museum and new mission and surrounding outstations, runs between Tjoritja West MacDonnell National Park and Finke Gorge National Park. The project's chorus is, Tjina Nurna-ka, Pmarra Nurn-kanha, Itla Itla Nurn-kanha / Our family, our country, our legacy, does not change.' - Iltja Ntjarra Artists.

If you've had one too many, you have drunk too much alcohol. Painted on each crushed and re-burnished aluminium can is a vignette, a miniature painting that recalls country and western songs about roads that 'take me home'. The road crosses land that is home to the Western Aranda people. The trip is marked by modified and re-purposed road signs warning us to 'Slow', carefully painted by Vanesa Inkamala and Selma Coulthard. A series of distance to destination markers, painted by all participants, count-down the journey.