Warwick Thornton

Stranded, Thornton\u2019s foray into creating artwork for a gallery space was commissioned by the 2011 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival through its investment fund and produced by Scarlett Pictures. It premiered at the festival in Stop(the)Gap, a major international Indigenous moving image project curated by Brenda L Croft for the Samstag Museum of Art. In 2011 Stills Gallery premiered the 3D screening of Stranded in Sydney along with a series of photographic works inspired by the video.

The video features Thornton \u201cas the central Christ-like figure \u2013 dead centre, if you like \u2013 with the unexpected addition of a skull and crossbones. Thornton\u2019s figure revolves in space above a mirrored waterhole in the brilliant harshness of the broken heartland, heightened by the unnerving sounds of wide open spaces \u2013 the chirruping of native birds, the ubiquitous blowfly buzz, the whoomp-ing sensation of windmill...or wind turbine? Dream(ing) or nightmare, or both?\u201d
Brenda L Croft 2011 Stop (the) Gap catalogue essay

The depiction of Thornton as Christ is at once melodramatic and subversive. He draws on certain cinematic conventions \u2014 the epic desert landscape as setting, the use of sound to heighten an emotional response, the high-tech 3D technology usually prevalent in blockbuster films \u2014 but provides no narrative resolution. In the similarly cinematic still images that accompany the video his crucified figure appears over desert, lake and city-scapes suggesting a Christ-like ubiquity, however in both video and photographic works, his deliberate open-endedness asks viewers to form their own assumptions. At one point in Stranded, for example, Thornton yawns on his cross. What are we to make of his boredom?

\u201cWe are (also) possibly witnessing a representation of a \u2018lost\u2019 Aboriginal generation, Thornton\u2019s own, no longer under missionary control, yet still nailed to the cross, detached and hovering above the Land. Perhaps in Stranded we encounter another \u2018muddying of the waters:\u2019 art that worries at the line between Indigenous and non-indigenous, elusively pushing beyond established concepts.\u201d
Tom Redwood \u2013 RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg.23