Image: Vernon Ah Kee, see me (detail), 2006, acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 3 parts 177 x 240 cm each. Courtesy Artbank, Sydney. Photo: Vernon Ah Kee and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

I am very excited to see the Vernon Ah Kee is IN the Biennale. Vernon and I go to uni together and I am a great fan.

[quote from BOS website]
Vernon Ah Kee’ s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings are a critique of Australian popular culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life.
Vernon Ah Kee will exhibit 12 charcoal and pastel drawings on canvas that continue his series of portraits of his family.The focus of each subject is their ‘gaze’ – the way they look back at the viewer.
Ah Kee’s drawings respond to the history of romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’ and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’ anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.