In the Shadow of the Telegraph Line
Marcus 'Double O' Camphoo Kemarre & Joseph Williams Jungarayi
20 Feb
2025
2025
8 Mar
2025
8 Hele & cbOne are excited to present at Melbourne Art Fair 20-23 Feb
Marcus 'Double O' Camphoo Kemarre & Joseph Williams Jungarayi
In collaboration with ARLPWE ART AND CULTURE CENTRE & NYINKKA NYUNYU ART AND CULTURE CENTRE
Also showing at cbOne until 8 Mar
Marcus and Joseph are founding members of the Tennant Creek Brio, they launched solo shows last year at Chapman & Bailey's gallery in Alice Springs, 8 Hele.
The much-acclaimed Tennant Creek Brio started as an outreach program at the local men’s centre Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation in 2016, they featured at the Biennale of Sydney(2020) and recently held their first major survey at ACCA(2024) Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis.
Chapman & Bailey presented the Tennant Creek Brio at Melbourne Art Fair (2022) and cbOne Gallery Remember Now Old Man Nomad (2023).
There is much common ground shared between Joseph Williams Jungarayi and Marcus Camphoo Kemarre. They are both Indigenous men form Northern Central Australia, whose lives and lineages hold strong a connection to Tennant Creek (Warumungu Country) and Ali Curung (Kaytetye Country). To friends, they are known by the bush names they were ascribed as schoolboys; Williams’ being Yugi, a nod to his Croatian (then Yugoslavian) heritage, and Camphoo’s being Double O, due to a childhood obsession with James Bond pictures. Most notably, they both earned their stripes as artists with the men’s art therapy-cum-contemporary art collective, Tennant Creek Brio. But it is their differences that illuminate the dynamic eclecticism of the group from which the two artists have emerged toward recent solo offerings.
What is shared by Yugi and Double O is their ability to imbue such spirit into their pictures that they are completely engulfing. Yugi’s hazy bush doctors peer out from their astral backdrop, surrounding the viewer in a haunting exchange. The expressive potential of Double O’s brash brushstroke pulsates through his colour fields, wrapping the viewer up in an intimate exchange. Their reunion at Melbourne Art Fair comes four months after the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s display of Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis, the group’s first major survey exhibition. Their solo offerings are testament to the rebellious spirit and artistic breadth of the Brio, piercingly addressing colonial histories, intergenerational trauma and the urgent need for truth-telling, while championing material and modal experimentation and cross-cultural collaboration.
- Excerpt from ‘Double O and Yugi’ introduction by Harry Price
See catalogue for full introduction by Harry Price and catalogue essay by Tristen Harwood.
Installation View
Artworks
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Artist Profile/s
Joseph Williams Jungarayi
Lives
Joseph Williams Jungurayi is a founding member of the Tennant Creek Brio. He is a multimedia artist, carver, writer, poet and emerging cultural leader of the Warumungu community. Williams began his carving as a teenager during the mid 1990s, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Nat Jupurula Williams and being taught by his second grandfather Walter Pula Nelson. “They made them the hard way”, says Williams, with an axe and wood rasp, whereas Williams now utilises a range of modern tools on mostly hardwood to create various reinvented traditional objects including spears, shields, and boomerangs. His work includes paintings and a contemporary perpetuation of traditional objects including kayin (boomerangs), wartikirri (number 7 boomerang), clapping sticks and purnu (coolamons) fashioned from hardwood. He has recently begun experimenting with figurative realism, drawing inspiration from his Warumungu and Croatian heritage. Amongst other forays he co-directed (with Peter Pecotić) the film Countryman 2021, broaching his Croatian heritage and opened various exhibitions and launches with his singing and poetry performances.
Currently working for Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre he is also on the board of Desart, the peak arts body for Central Australian Aboriginal Arts and Crafts centres. Joseph believes in the value and success of the Brio as a role model for the younger generation. One of the last 20 or so remaining Warumungu speakers in Tennant Creek, he has worked as a translator (and natural spokesperson) for numerous publications and documents relating to the Brio and is a director for Papulu Appar-Kari Language and Cultural Centre.
Williams’ work has most recently been exhibited at his first solo show at Coconut Studios (Darwin) this year. As a member of the Tennant Creek Brio his work has also been exhibited in group shows, including: ACCA (2024), Biennale of Sydney (2020), Cassandra Bird Gallery (2024), Niagra Galleries (2023), cbOne (2022), RAFT Artspace (2023 & 2021), Modern Times Melbourne Design Week (2022), Croatia House (2020), Vincent Lingiari Art Award (2021).
Marcus ‘Double O’ Camphoo Kemarre
Lives
Born in 1990, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre, aka, ‘Double O’, is a Kaytetyeand Alywarr man living between Ali Curung and Tennant Creek. He paints at both Arlpwe Art and Culture centre in Ali Curung, and at in Tennant Creek at Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre as the youngest member of the men's collective, The Tennant Creek Brio. Known as 00 (“double-o”) he has developed a distinctive minimalism of formal structural grids that resonate with early Western desert practices of body markings. These grids and bands, often rendered with loose and textural qualities evoke the iconography of the Western Desert and the structural frames of painting.
He has had multiple showings, including 20th Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, RAFT Artspace, Desert Mob, The Salon De Refuse 2020, and at the 2022 NGV Design Week at Modern Times. His works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Araluen Arts Centre, as well as several private collections.