Born in Melbourne, the artist Clinton Nain considers the history of his homeland in his potent paintings and performance art. Nain exposes the vicious crimes against traditional landowners of the country by European settlers, tackling these difficult subjects with a sophisticated wit and injecting a seemingly absurd humour. Nain’s life has been shaped by Aboriginal politics; he attended his first Aboriginal land rights protest when he was just one month old with his activist mother.
Nain creates vivid abstract canvasses and employs domestic materials for his mediums, such as heritage coloured house paint, bitumen paint and household bleach. In his work the artist employs a range of motifs that refer to the dominant culture and are symbolic of its power, ranging from language, religion, land, country, crown to colonisation of the dispossessed. Though Nain’s work has a naive and unfinished quality, his exercises in paint are aesthetically and conceptually intellectual and highly developed. In fact the artist has been described as one of the most complex and visually subtle artists of his generation.
Nain is well known for his White King, Blak Queen series, a visual pun on colour and sexuality. The series explored the tainted path of colonisation through a unique and vital black feminine perspective, challenging white masculine dominance. Through performance, storytelling and staining fabrics with bleach, the Blak Queen boldly quests for equality. Nain explored these ideas further in his later exhibition, Whitens, Removes Stains, Kills Germs. Though seemingly similar, each motif in the Target series are each individually distinct, like the humans they stand as metaphors for. The concept of Aboriginal people as targets comes from several appalling accounts of colonising whites using bound captives for shooting practice.
Since obtaining his Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and his Master of Fine Art at the University of New South Wales, Clinton Nain has established a significant place in the critical debates of contemporary Australian art. His work is held in the collections of The National Gallery of Victoria, The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Queensland Art Gallery, The Australian Museum in Sydney and in several University and corporate collections. He has exhibited and performed widely in Australia and Europe.
