In the Shadow of the Telegraph Line : Marcus 'Double O' Camphoo Kemarre & Joseph Williams Jungarayi

8 Hele & cbOne are excited to present at Melbourne Art Fair 20-23 Feb

Marcus 'Double O' Camphoo Kemarre & Joseph Williams Jungarayi‍

In collaboration with ARLPWE ART AND CULTURE CENTRE & NYINKKA NYUNYU ART AND CULTURE CENTRE

Also showing at cbOne until 8 Mar

Marcus and Joseph are founding members of the Tennant Creek Brio, they launched solo shows last year at Chapman & Bailey's gallery in Alice Springs, 8 Hele.

The much-acclaimed Tennant Creek Brio started as an outreach program at the local men’s centre Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation in 2016, they featured at the Biennale of Sydney(2020) and recently held their first major survey at ACCA(2024) Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis.

Chapman & Bailey presented the Tennant Creek Brio at Melbourne Art Fair (2022) and cbOne Gallery Remember Now Old Man Nomad (2023).

There is much common ground shared between Joseph Williams Jungarayi and Marcus Camphoo Kemarre. They are both Indigenous men form Northern Central Australia, whose lives and lineages hold strong a connection to Tennant Creek (Warumungu Country) and Ali Curung (Kaytetye Country). To friends, they are known by the bush names they were ascribed as schoolboys; Williams’ being Yugi, a nod to his Croatian (then Yugoslavian) heritage, and Camphoo’s being Double O, due to a childhood obsession with James Bond pictures. Most notably, they both earned their stripes as artists with the men’s art therapy-cum-contemporary art collective, Tennant Creek Brio. But it is their differences that illuminate the dynamic eclecticism of the group from which the two artists have emerged toward recent solo offerings.

What is shared by Yugi and Double O is their ability to imbue such spirit into their pictures that they are completely engulfing. Yugi’s hazy bush doctors peer out from their astral backdrop, surrounding the viewer in a haunting exchange. The expressive potential of Double O’s brash brushstroke pulsates through his colour fields, wrapping the viewer up in an intimate exchange. Their reunion at Melbourne Art Fair comes four months after the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s display of Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis, the group’s first major survey exhibition. Their solo offerings are testament to the rebellious spirit and artistic breadth of the Brio, piercingly addressing colonial histories, intergenerational trauma and the urgent need for truth-telling, while championing material and modal experimentation and cross-cultural collaboration.
- Excerpt from ‘Double O and Yugi’ introduction by Harry Price