Today in the lecture we looked at Torres Strait Islander art. I have to say out of all the different branches of Aboriginal art, this is my favourite. There are three different types of Torres Strait Islander Art, that being, Traditional, Urban or Traditional crossed with urban.
An example of a traditional TSI artist would be James Eseli. Without understanding of any TSI artworks, my first impression was that he was a ubran contemporary artist. His work of the fighter pilot plane is acutally a traditional head piece about a traditional story/dance about the plane that crashed in WWII. Every single part of this piece is traditional, down to the fine detailing.
Urban TSI artist are ones that have moved away from TSI or are descendents from TSI and include reference to Western art theory in their work.
An example of a mixed Urban/traditional TSI artist is Ricardo Idagi whose dance machine won the Telstra new media award. This piece is a massive head piece with traditional moving parts to be worn in a traditional dance from TSI. What makes this new media is that inside the head piece is a video of the artist dancing with the headpiece on. It really is amazing to look at.
There is now a new wave of TSI artists coming out of cairns. These artists include Dennis Nora, Alick Tipoti, Ken Thaiday and Ricardo Idagi. These arists lack their cultural knowledge of their elders, and tend to explore issues of identity by referencing to traditional histories and 19th century objects.
Images can be found from : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-12/ricardo-idagi-with-his-winning-work/2836148
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