Past exhibitions

No sleep till Dreamtime takes its cue from the Beastie Boys single 'No sleep till Brooklyn’.

'As an urban Indigenous Australian, my work often references the hip-hop and graffiti subcultures that were influential on my artistic practice in my formative years’, says Reko Rennie, a Kamilaroi artist based in Melbourne. 'In this work I have merged traditional Kamilaroi diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity.’

Rennie’s art explores issues of Aboriginal identity within an urban environment. Largely biographical, his commanding works combine the iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti and street art. Rennie’s current regalia feature heavily in the exhibition – the Aboriginal flag, the crown and the diamond – as a way of both asserting and questioning the sovereignty of Australia. The exhibition builds on Rennie’s ongoing quest to remember the past to better understand the present and work towards a different future.