Gordon Bennett Artist Essay

Gordon Bennett was born on 8 October 1955 in Monto, Queensland of Aboriginal and English/Scottish heritage. Bennett enrolled as a matureage student at Queensland College of Art in 1986 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) degree in 1988. Gordon Bennett is a coetaneous artist and says his earlier art recreate where influenced by his personal experiences. Bennetts work is defining Australian Culture and Aboriginal History, he wanted to switch over the way Australia and the world saw Indigenous Australians. Bennett includes a point on the role and power of language, including visual representations, in shaping identity, culture, social issues and history.Bennetts work alludes to visual and verbal violence of history of black and white relations, his scenes from outside Australia, deconstructing history and exposing the ideologies and structures that shape history. Bennett works both in traditional easel paintings and in multi-media, Photography, printmaking, video, exe cution and installation. The critical and aesthetic strategies of postmodernism have had significant impact on the development of his art practice.His work is layered and complex and often incorporates images, styles or references drawn from sources much(prenominal) as social history text books, western art history and Indigenous art. The emphasis on making art about art which is the focus of his non-representational abstract paintings, contrasts clearly with the focus on social critique that was integral to Bennetts earlier work, and is intended to provoke viewers thinking and opens up newborn possibilities for understanding the subjects he explores.