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Although Rennie grew up in Melbourne, Victoria, his heritage lies with the Kamilaroi people of northern New South Wales. The significance of this lineage was instilled by his grandmother Julia, who was forcibly removed from her family in the 1920s and enslaved on a pastoral station. A childhood memory of a photograph 鈥� depicting a pastoralist and his wife seated in their Rolls-Royce in 鈥淪unday best鈥� 鈥� became a potent symbol of injustice for Rennie. The image of colonial wealth and leisure stood in stark contrast to his grandmother鈥檚 dispossession.

In OA_RR (Original Aboriginal Reko Rennie), Rennie reclaims this symbol. Driving a 1973 Rolls-Royce Corniche, hand-painted in his signature fluorescent camouflage layered with traditional Kamilaroi diamond patterns, he journeys back to Country near his grandmother鈥檚 birthplace. Camouflage, historically used to conceal, becomes a strategy of amplification in Rennie鈥檚 hands, an assertion rather than a disguise. As he performs circular movements in the red earth, the vehicle鈥檚 tracks reference both urban burnout culture and ceremonial Kamilaroi sand engravings. The emotive soundtrack by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds intensifies the ritualistic and cinematic quality of this return, transforming the landscape into a site of remembrance and resistance.

The companion work, Reko Rennie: Initiation OA_RR, shifts to the industrial docks and streets of Footscray in Melbourne鈥檚 west 鈥� territory formative to Rennie鈥檚 youth. Here, a metallic pink 1973 Holden Monaro performs burnouts against a backdrop of shifting urban identity. The work operates as a self-portrait and homage to his grandmother, who once dreamt of becoming an opera singer. That unrealised aspiration resonates through a commissioned operatic score by Yorta Yorta composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham, performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and sung in Kamilaroi language. Her soaring voice overlays spectacle with cultural sovereignty and intergenerational healing.

Beginning in Melbourne鈥檚 graffiti scene, Rennie has consistently translated Kamilaroi design vocabularies into bold contemporary forms across painting, sculpture, installation, and film. His 鈥渞everse camouflage鈥� refuses invisibility, whether on suburban trains or within museum walls worldwide. Together, OA_RR and Initiation OA_RR collapse boundaries between street performance and ceremony, colonial history and contemporary assertion. Through movement, mark-making, and sound, Rennie transforms both desert and docklands into charged terrains of memory 鈥� declaring continuous Aboriginal presence, pride, and cultural authority.    

The Artist

Reko Rennie (born 1974) is a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay/Gummaroi artist based in Melbourne whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, video and public art. Rennie鈥檚 work is deeply rooted in his lived experience drawing on the visual languages of popular culture and his Kamilaroi heritage. Largely self-taught, he began his creative journey as a teenager producing graffiti across the streets and laneways of Melbourne鈥檚 inner west, a formative influence that continues to shape his bold aesthetic and use of colour.

Rennie fuses traditional diamond-shaped Kamilaroi motifs with contemporary forms and media to challenge romanticised assumptions about Aboriginal art and identity, and to spark conversations about cultural visibility, power and history in a contemporary urban context. His distinctive visual language 鈥� often featuring repeated geometric patterns, symbolic stencils and vibrant palette 鈥� negotiates contested binaries of visible and invisible, public and private, traditional and modern.

_{Header Image: Reko Rennie OA_RR, 2016-17 Video still, three-channel video, sound, edition of 3 + 2AP, Image courtesy the artist and STATION}.