Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
Middle of Now | Here, Inaugural Honolulu Biennale, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2017
Sydney Contemporary, Alcaston Gallery, 10 September - 13 September 2015
Collection+: Greg Semu, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, 7 October – 10 December 2016
Personal Structures / Crossing Borders, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy, 9 May – 22 November 2015 (another example)

LITERATURE
Collection+: Greg Semu exh. cat., Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, 2016, p. 16, p. 47 (illus.), p. 86

'The process of interrogating and displacing the concept of the Noble Savage permeates Semu's practice, made omnipresent by the artist's representation within his own work. It is this agency in image-making, denied to generations before him, which is being reclaimed here. The character of the Noble Savage is being inhabited, incorporated and reasserted. No longer the object, he is the powerful subject turning the colonial gaze in on itself, flirting with the stereotypes in order to diminish their authority.

This cultural mana is further asserted in Earning my Stripes (2015)...extending beyond the the depiction of the traditional Samoan tatau (tattoo), to present the artist's body directly following the completion of the final process of the perforation of his skin. Undertaken some two decades after beginning the traditional process of becoming soga'imiti (A Samoan man who has completed his tattoos), the auto-portraits portray the final tapestry of ink across the back connecting the shoulders. Again, identity is obscured, with the artist's head cloaked in black cloth. His identity and geneology is instead inscribed upon his skin, documented here at the most raw phases, immediately after a long and painful process of being tattooed by the traditional means of using a set of handmade tools - fashioned from pieces of bone, turtle shell and wood.'1

1. Mark Feary, 'Greg Semu: On Nobility and Mobility' in Collection+: Greg Semu exh. cat., Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney, 2016, p. 47 (illus.), p. 16