By Parker McKenzie
Artist Rod Moss travelled from Alice Springs to Burrinja Cultural Centre on Saturday 27 August, celebrating the launch of his exhibition All My Fat Country and his book Dancing Under Heavy Manner – Love Songs from Central Australia.
The exhibition is running until Monday 8 October and features paintings of the local country of Alice Springs, where Mr Moss has lived since the 1980s, drawn in graphite.
Mr Moss, who was born in Ferntree Gully, said he has been making works about the cross-cultural situation in Alice Springs and the racial divide that “really hits you as almost as soon as you get off the tarmac into town” for over 30 years.
“I turned my attention probably 18 months or so ago to doing the country that we’ve walked through together,” he said.
“All of these places, they’re probably all within about 3km of my house and about 1km of the camp on the eastern side of town. These are places I’ve walked through and I’m really familiar with.”
Mr Moss created the artwork featured in the exhibition using a pencil and an eraser and said they are photographically based.
“There’s a lot of erasing in the grasses and the fine detail, sometimes I go too heavy into the tones and I need to pull it back a little bit,” he said.
“They’ve been collaged from many photographs. Even though the natural given formations are fairly well composed as if someone has placed them, I’ve done a little bit of maneuvering.”
Mr Moss has also written several memoirs and launched his new book at Eltham Bookshop.
He said art and writing are about the same experience, even though they are different mediums.
“Some of the stuff I’m doing are serious things, and serious is the right word about it,” he said.
“I’m really full of intent. You don’t want distraction; you can’t jump between the two.”
Mr Moss, who was born in Ferntree Gully and grew up in Boronia, said he has held a previous exhibition at Burrinja in 2014 as well as another book launch.
“Knowing Sherbrooke Forest reasonably well, I used to run through here when I was in my younger and fitter days,” he said.
“We walked these hills and this here would have been around the limit to where we would go.”
Some of the art features prose written across the pencil drawn in pencil, which Mr Moss used to dedicate the art to his brother who passed away earlier in the year.
He said the scale of his art has changed since he left Melbourne in the early 1980s.
“The Indigenous thing is right in your face in Alice Springs. Within about 18 months or two years, I became enmeshed with the people on the east side of town and their camps and travelled with them,” he said.
“My whole feeling really fundamentally changed and fine-tuned. I packed up wanting to know what was happening in the territory.”
Mr Moss also taught painting and drawing in Alice Springs and continues to live there since retiring in 2008.
You can find out more about All My Fat Country at burrinja.org.au/burrinja-whats-on/whats-on-art/1717-all-my-fat-country-rod-moss
