A Cruel Tutelage is both lament and affirmation. It’s darkness and light. 

A Cruel Tutelage abstractly explores the personal, spiritual and cultural impact of impositions designed to diminish First Nations peoples’ stewardship of Country and agency over the self. Artist Jack Wilkie-Jans (a Waanyi, Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man from Mapoon, Cape York Peninsula) presents three correlating bodies of work—created over a five-year period—that speak to this psychological tension yet are distinct in media. 

A series of short films, or “moving portraits” (as Jack calls them), engage with fragmented imagery, spoken word, and unsettling soundscapes to evoke states of fear, alienation and [ultimately] resistance. These works—including the exhibition’s photographic contributions—confront the ongoing political pressures and spiritual attack, shaped by colonial machinations (and other shadowy forces), proposing how steadfast Indigenous identity instils mettle in opposing these attacks.  

Their cut-up aesthetic mirrors the fractured experience of living, partially, under and in shadows, where identity and spiritual power are contested terrain, shaped by personal histories yet are continually attempted to be reframed by the forces of Evil. These portraits are anything but passive reflections; they are confrontations, questioning how Indigeneity is perceived and usurped by political and attempted spiritual devices of domination. 

Jack’s painted works remark on beings that go “bump” in the night, the watchers of Country, the Ancestral manifestations and the all-together non-human. These works are a recognition and rationalisation of these on-Country and metaphysical beings and their omni-presence.  

It’s a thing to remember, the sunsets of home… and the coming of nights not scary.  Memories. And a longing for the dying blaze of a day leading into a night with no more wolves at the door. Nor of torches burning our beds anymore.  Warm cold nights with my Grandmother like before…  The new dawn is my one true fate, which I share with all my peoples. The works of A Cruel Tutelage speak to the sustained and precarious practice of ‘beauty’: That of mine and my peoples—who’ve been through Hell and back; and back to Old Ways, into our new age where we are masters of our Country, our fears and our futures like the true old days.” ”
Jack Wilkie-Jans