Danie Mellor
Danie Mellor (born 13 April 1971) is an Australian artist who was the winner of 2009 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award.
[12] In the early 1990s, Mellor won drawing prizes at the ANU's Canberra School of Art and the Grafton Regional Gallery in New South Wales.
[19] Reviewing the 2008 exhibition, academic Sarah Scott expressed surprise that Mellor's 2008 piece had neither attracted an award nor been purchased for the Northern Territory's public collection.
[8] Mellor's work was represented in the first National Indigenous Art Triennial in 2007, with the elaborate (and elaborately named) sculpture The contrivance of a vintage Wonderland (A magnificent flight of curious fancy for science buffs, a china ark of seductive whimsy, a divinely ordered special attraction, upheld in multifariousness) featuring a diorama that included sculpted kangaroos made with blue and white crockery fragments (evoking Spode bone china), real kangaroo skin (used for the ears and paws), and synthetic eyeballs; stuffed birds sat in a life-sized mixed-media tree overhead.
[10][26][27][28] In August 2009, Mellor won the AU$40,000 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, for his mixed media work From Rite to Ritual.
[31] Also in that year, Mellor's work was featured alongside that of Patricia Piccinini and Cherry Hood in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery's show Animal Attraction.
[36] Mellor received international recognition in 2013, when he was included in Sakahàn, the National Gallery of Canada's "most ambitious contemporary art exhibition in its history".
[45] His work featured as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, with a show titled Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral displayed at the National Museum of Scotland.
[46] A large work of Mellor's, Entelekheia (2016), consisting of photographic images of plants etched in concrete, can be found on the exterior walls of the International Convention Centre in Sydney.
[47] In interviews he has acknowledged the influence of diverse artists, including Indigenous painter Rover Thomas, Australian Sulman Prize winner Tim Storrier, Romantic painters including Germany's Caspar David Friedrich, and contemporary German artists Joseph Beuys, and Beuys' student Anselm Kiefer.
Reflecting on that sculpture, Artlink Magazine's reviewer, Daniel Thomas, remarked on how the work signified "how colonisers always get things wrong; how Europeans looking for China, and its fine porcelain manufactures, stumbled instead upon the land of the kangaroo, and traded and planted ideas of racial and cultural superiority".
[48] When Sarah Scott considered the 2008 work Exotic Lies and Sacred Ties, which, like From Rite to Ritual, drew on evocations of Spode china, she highlighted its exploration of the history of cross-cultural relations.
This work recalls the museum dioramas in which Aboriginal people, who until 1967 were classified under the Flora and Fauna act, appeared amongst exotic taxidermy objects.
Mellor, in an artist's statement for the awards, described the work as showing "what is a moment of contact, a conversation and interaction between two cultures; it speaks of the challenges of settlement, and the differences in spiritual enactment and belief".
[50] Art writer Nicolas Rothwell described the work as drawing a parallel "between Aboriginal initiation rituals and the ceremonies inside a Masonic lodge.
[57] Art writer Maurice O'Riordan, reviewing the 2009 Award, noted the Bolt controversy but pointed out that Mellor, while in early works acknowledging his Indigenous heritage, is not concerned with the definition of Aboriginality, but with historical interaction between cultures and the reimagining of history.
