Christopher Pease. Photo by Cole Baxter.
Christopher Pease
Permanent Display
AGWA Rooftop
One of the most significant commissions of a Noongar artist in Western Australian history.
A new 34-metre long, 5-metre tall light-based artwork commissioned from Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun artist Christopher Pease takes up place on the Perth city skyline, wrapping around the exterior walls of AGWA’s new rooftop. Titled Targets, the work celebrates the ongoing importance of the Derbarl Yerrigan — the Noongar name for the Swan River — to Perth’s identity and its ecosystem. It’s one of the artist’s most significant public works to date and the largest public commission from a Noongar artist in Western Australian history.
In Targets, Pease reworks Frederick Garling’s 1827 colonial work Swan River – View from Fraser’s Point. His painting, printed on giant conjoined panels, sits in front of a layer of LED lights which, when lit at night, shine through perforated patterns referencing traditional Noongar body paint.
Such reproduction of classical works is typical of Pease’s practice. Pease’s visual language is at once deeply embedded within the western history of figurative oil painting and traditional Indigenous storytelling.
“In the end what Pease has created, really, is a reclamation of Boodjar (Country). Our Boodjar that was never ceded.” — Claire G. Coleman, The View From Here 2021
His multilayered paintings often comprise references to western culture superimposed over scenes of traditional Indigenous ways of living and interacting with nature, exploring the loss of Aboriginal culture as a consequence of Western notions of home and land ownership.
