Rodeo Baby!

Australia, 2022

Commissioned by ACMI

Artwork ACMI commissions First Nations

“The artwork is centred upon the belief that it is our own bodies that are the truest archive of our experience and that any documentation is only ever an approximation of the person doing the gazing – not the gazed.”

While trawling archival video material, Jazz Money discovered an overwhelming amount of footage of First Peoples in rodeos. There was the joy of seeing Blak faces, but an unease in knowing non-Indigenous voyeurs likely captured the footage. In the vast network of archives in this country’s institutions, photos and videos of First Peoples are filed away, with the people who have been recorded – often unknowingly – and their descendants unaware the recordings exist.

Jazz reclaims these images, combining them with stills from film and TV, including The Phantom Stockman (1953), Radiance (1998) and The Drover’s Wife (2021), in this large-scale photographic essay. It celebrates First Peoples representation and the Aboriginal scholars who critique this colonial hoarding, giving new meaning to images that have been dislocated by archival practices. Jazz asks, “If these archival collections are the rodeo, who is playing cowboy with our images?”

This work contains First peoples content

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Collection

In ACMI's collection

Previously on display

19 February 2023

ACMI: Gallery 4

Credits

artist

Jazz Money

Production places
Australia
Production dates
2022

Collection metadata

ACMI Identifier

Z000203

Curatorial section

How I See It: Blak Art and Film → Zone 9

Object Types

Artwork

Materials

Digital print on fabric

Collected

4989 times

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Cite this work on Wikipedia

If you would like to cite this item, please use the following template: {{cite web |url=https://acmi.net.au/works/121856--rodeo-baby/ |title=Rodeo Baby! |author=Australian Centre for the Moving Image |access-date=23 March 2023 |publisher=Australian Centre for the Moving Image}}