Shock of the New
The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
“Hell is others.” It’s probably not the best way to introduce an artist collective founded on the idea that strength comes from working together, that the harmonious whole is greater than the individual parts. But “hell” and its various connotations does relate to the work of the Tennant Creek Brio and to the Italian word “brio” itself, which signifies “fire” as both a destructive and creative force. “Hell” might relate to contemporary life at Tennant Creek, or at least how it’s generally depicted in mainstream reports as a broken-down town best passed through on the way to and from Alice Springs or the so-called Devil’s Marbles nearby.
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Shock of the New by Maurice O’Riordan is featured in full in Issue 2 of Memo magazine.
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The Tennant Creek Brio’s art isn’t a legible script, a tidy lineage, or an easy metaphor—it’s a rupture, a refusal, a site of resurgence. This story sends us somewhere else, reaching for something that came before or after, looking for what’s out back, round the back of the house, the shed, the art centre, the “outback.”
