Like many of Christian Thompson’s projects, his series Native’s instinct shows the artist performing a self-portrait for the camera. Thompson produced the works in this series while undertaking a residency at the Australia Council’s Greene Street Studio in Manhattan. While in New York, Thompson became interested in the appropriation of indigenous American styles of adornment in contemporary street fashion. In response he created strange, urbane warrior figures using face-paint and feathers, suggestive of both the war bonnets worn by Native American Plains Indian warriors and the colours of the Australian Aboriginal flag. The politically charged nature of these allusions is undercut by the subject’s countenance: he stares at the camera in a blank or expressionless way.
(2016)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
