Sign Language

Blak Douglas & Jarra Karalinar Steel
 

Sign Language is a duo exhibition by Blak Douglas and Jarra Karalinar Steel that stages the contemporary city as a field of contested legibility, where Indigenous presence is continuously translated and re-inscribed through visual economies and the language of signage, advertising, and digital landscapes. Within this environment, the “sign” is never neutral: it operates as both interface and constraint, a surface upon which meaning is flattened into instant recognition while deeper cultural intelligences are rendered peripheral or invisible.

Rather than treating urban visual culture as a backdrop, the exhibition works through it as material— asking how First Nations language and identity are made to circulate as icon, brand, or token within an attention economy structured by visibility. Against this compression, KaralinarSteel colonises urban and digital spaces. Her engagement with ‘Wominjeka’ reopens language as a site of ethical address rather than passive greeting, returning it to questions of intent, responsibility, and relational accountability– stating purpose. While Douglas repositions reading itself as an act structured by power: what is seen, what is assumed, and what is overwritten in the process of looking. The exhibition draws a direct tension between inherited systems of making and contemporary modes of circulation. Douglas’ mark-making, informed in part by his family history in commercial sign painting, carries through a visual language of flattened planes of colour and graphic clarity, a recalling of pop-inflected removal of the visible gesture of the artist’s hand- not a dot, not a brush. In doing so, the work unsettles the authority of the image, insisting instead on meanings that exceed surface translation and celebrate the dichotomic nature of expressing identity which can be equally joyful and frustrating.

As an exhibition in dialogue, a call and response between the artists is instinctual, for when we share story, it’s in conversation. So, for this exhibition we have an artist talk to introduce the works rather than an essay. Click the image below for access to the talk between Blak Douglas and Jarra Karalinar Steel.