TRANSCULTURATION: SUBLIME AND SURREAL ENCOUNTERS

Helen S Tiernan’s new exhibition Transculturation: Sublime and Surreal Encounters of First Contact in the Antipodes, will be opened by renowned historian and author Professor Ian McLean at Sydney’s Cooee Art Gallery on Saturday 6 May. Tiernan’s paintings navigate the complex terrain of early colonial visual art history and the interpretation of early colonial encounters in Australia and Oceania by Europeans. Under Tiernan’s investigative gaze, archival histories of colonial encounters are re-contextualized (re-skinned) highlighting ‘the incommensurability’ of two distinctly different cultures that inevitably ended in collision