Conceptio

Gordon Bennett’s Dismay, Displace, Disperse, Dispirit, Display, Dismiss revisits, reexamines, revisions, and recontextualizes the past from a contemporary perspective. Based on the piece Untitled Bennett created in 1989, and that was featured in his first solo exhibition, the artist magnifies, reworks, and poses again the question on the status of rights and recognition for the Indigenous population in his home country of Australia.

Six white canvases comprise rectangular images, each one a key moment lifted from Australian history, and inscriptions of individual titles authoritatively stenciled. Image is underscored with text in order to generate fresh and unforeseen correlations in this conceptual commentary on a very charged subject. One of Australia’s most eloquent and ardent artist-activists, Gordon Bennett makes work that compels his audience to read, look, think, and ascertain. In the process of reconciling the pictorial with the textual, the audience questions accounts of history to assess all that has transpired, or has remained largely unchanged, over a twenty-year period.