The NCCA is proud to host a major retrospective of the Alice Springs artist Rod Moss during this year’s Darwin Festival. Entitled ‘White Man You Are Surrounded’, the exhibition chronicles Moss’s work over more than three decades.Rod Moss is probably the most significant non-Aboriginal artist working in the NT for the past three decades. His monumental works have chronicled the interaction between European and Aboriginal Australia in the central desert region since the late 1980s. As he writes: “The most significant experience for me, in Alice Springs, has been touching indigenous lives, and I wanted to bring something of this into my art. Where else in Australia would I be so painfully aware that two strikingly opposed cultures share a space while operating in parallel universes? Where was the art reflecting this fact?”"For me, the intoxication of being a stranger in a strange land has never diminished. How do I make sense with the discomfort of the climate, the remoteness, the strained intimacies we enjoin, the distance from our roots, the disparities and dialogue between the dominant culture and the indigenous ones.”Moss’s work is large in scale, reflecting the vastness of the desert landscapes his subjects inhabit. His works are realist in execution, but often draw on the cannon of Western art for their imagery. This dissonance between the tradition he works in and his subject matter is one of the enduring strengths of his work. On a more fundamental level, his paintings continue the tradition of the figure in the landscape with narrative and drama conveyed through the human body, its gestures and facial expressions.Rod Moss’s talents are not confined to the visual arts. As a writer, he has one numerous awards, in particular winning the Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction for his 2010 chronicle, ‘The Hard Light of Day’. Rod Moss’s latest book, ‘Crossing the Great Divide’, will be launched by Marie Munkara at the opening of ‘White Man You Are Surrounded’.Never didactic, always poignant, Rod Moss’s work is an enduring chronicle of white and black Australia. Curated by Hamish McDonald.