Plus / Minus: 10th - 31st October 2026

At first glance, the paintings of Marcus ‘Double O’ Camphoo Kemarre and Clifford Thompson Japaljarri can appear remarkably close. Lines repeat across surfaces, squares sit inside squares, bands of colour divide and contain space. Both artists return insistently to repetition, geometry and rhythm. Yet the apparent formal relationship between their work quickly gives way to something far more complex. 

Both artists are connected to Alekarenge (Ali Curung), a small community approximately 350 kilometres north-east of Mparntwe and 150 kilometres south of Tennant Creek. Double O lives and paints there today, Clifford was raised there before moving to Tennant Creek. Their histories intersect across the Barkly, a region shaped by extraordinarily strong and continuing cultural life, but also by the ongoing effects of colonisation, pastoralism, mining and resource extraction.

For Clifford, that history remains important in understanding his work, where paintings do not present Country as untouched or somehow outside the present. Country is lived in now. It contains roads, signs, petroleum drums, mining infrastructure and the discarded remnants of industry alongside cultural memory, family and ancestral connection. Clifford speaks plainly about his opposition to mining and fracking. Across the exhibition, this language moves between canvas, Masonite and found industrial objects. Double O arrives at repetition from somewhere else entirely. His practice has developed largely through an intensely individual and intuitive process. Grids, bands and window-like structures recur across his paintings, generated through something resembling a private system of mental mathematics. He establishes borders, divides the surface and works rapidly within them, pushing and dragging paint across coarse linen. There is structure, but never rigidity. Lines wobble, colours collide and splatters remain as evidence of the speed and physicality of their making.

It is tempting, then, to understand Double O and Clifford primarily through their formal similarities. But doing so risks missing precisely what makes their pairing compelling. The same visual devices -lines, repetition, grids, enclosed forms - are doing profoundly different things. Clifford's lines can locate and insist upon what has happened to Country, Double O's open onto an interior and less readily articulated space. One draws our attention towards the material conditions of the contemporary Barkly, while the other continually draws us to the inward experience of a man currently living it. And yet neither practice exists outside those conditions. The work of the Tennant Creek Brio has powerfully asserted this complexity, refusing romantic expectations of what Aboriginal art, or Indigenous life in a regional Central Australian town is supposed to appear as. Seen within this context, painting itself can become an act of resistance. Not necessarily through explicit political declaration, but through the insistence on making, thinking and determining one's own visual language. 

Their shared connection to Ali Curung and Tennant Creek therefore matters not because it produces a shared aesthetic, but because it locates these apparently abstract paintings within a real and contemporary place. The similarities between their works draw us in, their differences tell us far more. Together, they offer two distinct ways of making from the Barkly now, two practices formed within overlapping geographies and histories, but refusing any expectation that they should speak with the same voice.

Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)