Doreen Chapman’s paintings of ATM machines are one of the hits of the current Sydney Biennale; they have people talking. They are prominently installed at the entrances of each of the Biennale’s venues, where actual ATMs might once plausibly have been located, as if standing in for them. One scours the Biennale’s wall texts and catalogue in vain for clues of the artist’s purposes in making them or the curators’ purposes in including and positioning them. They remain a curious presence.

Born at Jigalong Mission in the early 1970s, Chapman primarily lives in Warralong Community and paints at Spinafex Hill Studios and Martwill Artists. Her naïve-style paintings often feature landscapes, flora and fauna, cars and aeroplanes, but ATM machines are a new subject for her. Chapman is deaf and non-verbal, and, as much as we may ponder the new works’ significance for her, she’s not telling.

Chapman’s ATM paintings are a mixed bag. Where they feature the acronym ‘ATM’ or a bank logo, the subject is clear. Where they don’t, we would be pushed to recognise the subject, without being told. The paintings have different characters. One, with chubby numerals, reminds me of Claes Oldenberg’s soft sculpture; another is more Rothkoesque. 

It’s odd to see abstracted frontal views of ATMs where one might expect to find abstracted aerial views of landscapes. I imagine a gallery guide standing in front of them explaining how money works and what a PIN is, where they might otherwise be telling tales of Country. 

The Biennale wall texts describe the paintings as depictions of contemporary Indigenous life. For the urbanised Biennale audience, in the EFTPOS epoch, ATMs and cash may feel like things of the just past—most of us have stopped using them. However, in remote communities, where many are poor, isolated from the internet, and live on benefits, ATMs play a big and central role. They can be few and far between and can run out of money.

I find it disorienting to see these ubiquitous, banal forms from my own culture—the mundane machinery of money—explored as mythic-poetic objects, oddly mirroring the way we are drawn to expressions of other cultures as enigmatic. 
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