If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be a fish, you have your chance at the Denver Art Museum from now until the end of July. Or at least you have the chance to to take on the vantage point of a fish, specifically an Australian fish that is being guided through the water by an elaborate fencing system, woven from bush cane, hibiscus, and jungle vines plucked from the land surrounding the shore, then engineered and placed there for your swimming pleasure, only to arrive at a corral where you are caught, whacked, cooked over a flame, and eaten for dinner. The tightly woven fence curves and rolls like it would under water as it’s pushed and pulled by a current, catching the light from above to throw a threaded shadow on the floor.
“Mun-dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence)” is one of many works that give Denver Art Museum visitors the chance to inhabit the point of view of someone — or something — else.
The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, on view at DAM until July 27, offers many vantage points: that of the fish from the water, the bird from sky, the collective view of a tree and its roots from within the ground, and most of all, the view of the human artists interpreting it all, from every angle they can imagine and capture with the tools and materials close at hand. The view from today, from a century, and 65,000 years ago, when indigenous people on the Australian continent first began making art to visualize and render their own experience. To see the world they were living in again. To see themselves.
A collaboration between the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., it’s the largest exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever presented in North America…