Adam Hill's exhibition 'Not for the faint hearted' at ARC (2007)

Hill is a young artist who follows the urban songlines - turning up the volume on indigenous issues, but still manages to be inclusive to a wide audience by employing a clever wit in his works depicting the degradation of our physical and political environment to feed corporate greed.

I missed Adam Hill's talk at ARC - I wish I could have heard him talk because I am a big fan of his politically supercharged themes so cleverly encapsulated in these paintings.

Hill's style is clearly shaped by his work as a graphic artist - however, it also owes a great deal to one of the great pioneering urban artists Robert Campblell Jr. Both artists employed a highly keyed palette, eschewing realism for symbolism. Whilst the late Robert Campbell Jr turned his attention to historical events, Hill tells stories of the here and now - not waiting for history to cleanse and sanitise the traumas endured by indigenous people under our current political system.

If I can summarise what the gallery staff passed on to me regarding some of the key symbols for Hill it makes reading his images a little easier. The trademark graphic for Hill is the flat bottomed clouds which allude to the low ceiling of opportunity for the majority of indigenous people. The majority of Hill's works have exactly seven clouds - one for each state and territory. Most pictures include the horizontal bands through the sky which add to the oppressive nature of the pictorial space. They also, in an oblique way might represent bars.

I am a fan of the pithy titles Hill has captioned his works with - it's great that he has a sense of humour - perhaps it is more inclusive than the didactic or vitriolic titles that might have accompanied images like these.

While the images are pointedly about the suffering of indigenous people, I sense that Hill is a humanist, concerned at the suffering of many Australians, black and white, focussing the spotlight on our current government's intransigence to protect the environment and reign in corporate greed and the internecine ways our bureaucrats duck their responsibility to the most disadvantaged groups in our community.

Check out his exhibition.

By Martin Shub, April 2007