Dylan Mooney is included in Performing Presence at Redland Art Gallery.
Performing Presence brings together a selection of artworks from the Redland Art Gallery Collection that take the human subject as their central form. This focus on the human body, combined with strategic framing, props and aesthetic techniques, centralises corporeal lived experience within social and political contexts. This includes an emphasis on works that incorporate the artist’s body, or a proxy for the artist, as a site to assert their presence as social and political subjects.
These artists draw on histories of representation in the visual arts and popular culture and use these as malleable frameworks which can be redefined and reimagined. Techniques of revealing and concealing the subject are employed in many of the artworks in Performing Presence, allowing multiple perspectives and states of being to be held within a single image.
Dylan Mooney’s Blak Superheroes (Kaigani) (2021) is an image of a character, Kaigani, taken from Mooney’s graphic novel, which is currently in development, titled Resistance. The character is a proud queer indigenous man from Far North Queensland who fights for justice and the rights of LGBTQIA+ and First Nations communities.
Kaigani is pictured floating against a swirling rainbow background that resembles the pattern on the superhero suit he wears. Employing a comic book aesthetic, the possum skin coat that adorns the figure bears a resemblance to a superhero cape. The pose, floating with one leg raised, is a familiar comic book trope. This gesture often occurs at points of narrative climax, signifying transformation, resolve and an assertion of presence.
The lining of the possum skin coat, which is visible as it flares in the wind, speaks directly
to community: “STILL HERE”, “ALWAYS WAS”, “BLAK + QUEER” and “THRIVING”. A pin portraying the Australian Aboriginal flag secures the coat in place. These positive and affirmative statements of political protest and struggle ground the fantastical character within the LGBTQIA+ and First Nation communities that the character represents and fights to protect.
- Text by Simone Hine
