In July 2022, Vernon Ah Kee was invited by Deadly Innovation (part of Queensland Government’s Advance Queensland) to develop a proposal for a project that could be an exhibition outcome featuring the Rock Art of Magnificent Gallery. The initial activity Vernon participated in was a ‘tech tour’ facilitated by KJR Enterprises and Jarramali Rock Art Tours. This involved spending 4 days traveling through Western Yalanji country alongside rangers and technologists. This year, Vernon further participated in a full-day Intellectual Property Workshop in Cairns with the Western Yalanji Corporation and stakeholders.
way to be explores the way in which we view and interact with cultural heritage sites such as the Western Yalanji galleries, using various technologies.
Growing up in Far North Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s, artist Vernon Ah Kee recalls the figures of the Magnificent Gallery were ever-present to the cultural backdrop of the day:
“I remember Cairns transformed itself from a sugar and fishing town in the 1970s into a tourism destination in the 1980s. The iconography of Western Yalanji Rock Art, in particular the images of Magnificent Gallery became an underpinning to that transformation. It was found on everything you could think of – tea towels, fridge magnets, postcards, t-shirts.”
The overexposure of Magnificent Gallery during that early tourism boom in Far North Queensland, led to a desensitisation of audiences to its scale and significant cultural heritage value. way to be seeks to provide an opportunity for audiences to think about rock art in new ways. Within an art context, way to be explores the way in which art and technology can intersect. The exhibition posits the potential of data-sets being created over coming decades as technologies grow in complexity.
way to be provides an opportunity to demonstrate to different audiences, new ideas and fresh conversations about the way to think about rock art. Ideas of rock art exist generally through the lens of tourism and ‘the colonial’. For many audiences, rock art is an abstract to a perceived ‘ancient’ society.
way to be seeks to provide a new lens and new way of engaging with data-sets through various technology lenses. These new ways of seeing and being include seeing data through multi-spectral colour analysis. Ground-penetrating lasers provide new ways of looking at the surrounding terrain to see what impact ochre has, and an examination to identify traces of biological matter and DNA.
Through way to be Magnificent Gallery defines and presents itself … a way to be.