RICHARD BELL (B. 1953)

While to a contemporary audience the claims of the didactic rhetoric collaged onto the surface of this work are obviously absurd, Bell's juxtaposition of the text with black and white photographs depicting enslaved Aborigines or pictured uncomfortably in Western clothes places the text in an historical context in which this rhetoric would have once held the status of an inviolable truth. The surface of the work is in itself an inscribed and wounded surface, bearing additions, incisions, stains and the traces of selective history.