Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia
  Purchased from Raft Artspace, Darwin in June 2002
  The Laverty Collection, Sydney
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Imanarra - recent works on paper by Butcher Cherel, Raft Artspace, Darwin, cat. no. 4
  
  JANANGOO BUTCHER CHEREL
  Janangoo Butcher Cherel is an artist whose work
  challenges categorization. Born of a Gooniyandi father
  and a Gija mother, he spent the early part of his life as a
  cattleman on Fossil Downs Station in the Kimberley. He
  commenced to paint in the early 1990s after Mangkaja
  Arts Resource Agency was established at Fitzroy Crossing.
  Ever resourceful and self-contained, Janangoo would sit
  in his corner studio of Mangkaja Arts and put in a full
  days' work, day after day. His experiences as a stockman
  and of the troubled history of the Kimberley provided
  Janangoo with a wealth of subject matter for his art,
  always represented in the context of the Ngarrangkarni
  (Dreaming) and the Law: he was an advocate for the
  retention of law and ceremony amongst younger
  generations and he used his art as a teaching mechanism.
  Janangoo taught not only the young Gooniyandi in his
  community at Muludja, but a world beyond. Janangoo's
  extensive range of imagery is drawn from observation
  of the minutia of the natural world to Gooniyandi
  cosmology, ceremony and its associated objects, and
  always situated in his ancestral lands. His sense of
  symmetry and composition, the delicacy of the touch
  of his brush and the fields of repeated motifs create a
  visual poetry that verges on the abstract; Janangoo '...
  reimagine[s] the world through nonfigurative means.'
  (Sprague, Q., Groundwork: Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Mick
  Jawalji, Rammey Ramsey, Melbourne: The Ian Potter
  Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2011, p. 9).
  
  Janangoo was proclaimed a Living Treasure by the
  government of Western Australia in 2004. Other than
  Groundwork in 2001, his work has been included in several
  other major exhibitions, including Images of Power;
  Aboriginal Art from the Kimberley at the National Gallery of
  Victoria in 1993, The Imanara Series/ Kerry Stokes Collection
  at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2000; the
  Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery
  of Victoria in 2006; Cross currents: focus on contemporary
  Australian art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
  Sydney in 2007; Breaking boundaries—contemporary Indigenous
  Australian art from the collection, Gallery of Modern Art—
  Queensland Art Gallery in 2008; and Ancestral Modern:
  Australian Aboriginal Art: Kaplan & Levi Collection, at the
  Seattle Art Museum in 2012.
  
  Wally Caruana

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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