Archie Moore: Friendship

It is with pleasure that The Commercial presents Friendship, a solo exhibition by Kamilaroi artist, Archie Moore. The exhibition comprises a new installation alongside Moore's small-edition t-shirt series, Shirtfront. Together the exhibition is an ironic oscillation between friends and enemies.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the name of a merchant brig in the First Fleet, a timber vessel that carried convicts of the British Crown from Portsmouth, England to Aboriginal land, arriving in 1788. Moore’s exhibition is the reconstruction of a dream that circles around the fall-out of this event, a delirious concatenation of cross forms representing, variously, ship, claims to ownership, the military, Christianity, targets (self and other), a (now defunct) flag, signature of the illiterate, and the deceased. A paucity of materials substantiates these symbols which, in their various alignments, summarise an indefensibly violent imperial assault against the original occupants, the people who had custodianship of this land for 80,000 years.

Trickling-down from this scenario of invasion, fast-forwarding over a handful of generations (less than 10), Moore has created a series of screenprints on t-shirt supports, “bittersweet counter shirts to popular political and tourist shirt slogans. A shirtfront to the racists, bigots and the ignorant.” (Moore) The t-shirts redouble with discomfort – very far from humour - confronting with words preferred left unsaid and unsayable, several quite possibly unwearable.