Settlers give niceties the flick
VISUAL ARTS
Daughters of the Empire: Thea Costantino
You Can’t Just Take Everything: Joan Ross
Turner Galleries
REVIEW LAETITIA WILSON
Thea Costantino and Joan Ross have presented epic exhibitions that look awry at grand historical narratives and twist them in ways that compel new perspectives.
Costantino tackles the British Empire and women in post- Federation Australia, from significant names such as Daisy Bates to generics such as mother and child, daughter and doll. Photographic portraiture and wax figures are deftly crafted to reference the traditional use of these modes of representation.
Historically, such art forms have been used to contain, preserve and memorialise the likeness of a given individual, as well as perpetuate their celebrity, as in the wax figure dioramas of Madame Tussauds.
With Costantino's art, however, things are never so straightforward. It is not just the deft repetition of technique that is on display but the pushing of it into uneasy depths, combining the two and generating ambiguous and uncanny objects and imagery.
These are artworks that crawl under the skin with a deathly sensibility, bypassing niceties and aesthetic pleasantry. The first piece confronted is a wax replica of the artist herself as a corpse, as an effigy laid out in funeral style on display for the final viewing. The likeness is striking and unsettling as she pauses somewhere between living and dead, real and synthetic, restful and ill at ease.
This ambiguity infuses all of the artist's works in this show and more widely. Several of the women photographed are dressed in colonial period clothing and have their faces covered over by barely discernible wax masks. Their eyes pierce through from the mysterious depths of the additional layer of "skin" which is barely apparent and makes it all the more troubling.
Overall it appears as though the daughters of the British Empire had a complicated existence struggling to reconcile familiarity and exoticism, motherhood and autonomy. Being a marginal group in colonial outposts of Britain comes across as a conflicted, aggressive and strained way of life.
As a complementary exhibition, Ross presents a powerful exploration of grand ideas, with a convoluted, sardonic humour. In still and video images, early colonial paintings by the likes of John Glover and Joseph Lycett are transformed into scenes that play out the invasion of Australia by early settlers. Ross' style is unabashedly explicit while at the same time heavily layered both literally and conceptually.
Hi-vis fluoro yellow is used as the colour of colonisation, representing power, mobility and myopia. It peppers the works as a deliberately offensive eyesore, implying the same for the settler on indigenous land.
In The Claiming of Things, a fluoro picket fence slices through a Glover painting in the artist's jolty cut-out animation style. In the animation Colonial Grab, a woman who plays a pokie machine to win a slice of Australian land wears a full fluoro colonial gown. Hi-vis wear guarantees the authority to go anywhere and do anything beyond liability.
The idyllic image of the Arcadian landscape is cluttered with the refuse of settler culture and society to become barely recognisable.
Then in the hand-painted print M'lady's Ikebana Room, indigenous people and trees become objects of aesthetic pleasure. The trees and people are literally removed from a Glover painting and arranged in vases by a fluoro-yellow adorned well-to-do colonial woman. Nature and humanity are contained and shaped according to settler desires.
Together these exhibitions have an impact, one is subtle and insidious while the other is ostentatious. Neither is shy in dealing with issues of consequence and should not be missed.
Daughters of the Empire and You Can't Just Take Everything end at Turner Galleries, 470 William Street, Northbridge, on November 1.
