Long before pop star Charli XCX and her garish Brat green, an Australian artist was using lurid colours to comment on colonisation.
Multimedia artist Joan Ross first noticed hi-vis fluorescent yellow everywhere after the terrorist attacks in the US in 2011, in part as a response to safety fears. She certainly didn't like the colour, but realised its potency - signalling both supremacy and access."It holds fear, it holds power, it holds authority, and it's alien to the landscape," she told AAP. "You could do anything you wanted to the land when you were wearing it." Deployed in Ross' digitally constructed landscapes, the highlighter yellow speaks volumes, communicating visually the jarring wrongs of early colonisation.
Of late, Ross has delved into the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, with its famed paintings of the likes of Captain Cook, for an exhibition that displays her art alongside the colonial style that has inspired it. "Those trees came back to me in my dreams" shows off three decades of work, with its commentary not only on colonisation but also consumerism, collecting, and environmental destruction.
Ross' work spans printmaking, sculpture, virtual reality and collage, with video animations made from a digital cut-and-paste of colonial paintings. These are painstakingly constructed, full of her trademark surreal wit, and even come with their own ad breaks. One exhorts viewers to catch the last ever call of the Sea Eagle - by calling 1-800 BIRD SONG before it's too late. Another is for a made-in-New-South-Wales perfume called Possession - a scent that gives you the permission to take anything you want. The works she is best known for commercially have come out of these videos - one still image shows an explorer surrounded by an abundance of flowers, holding a trophy that says Mine, a blowfly sitting on the crook of his arm. These kinds of details are Ross' way of undermining the beauty of her art - look closely to find elements designed to provoke disgust, such as flies or even excrement.
The artist admits to a love-hate relationship with early colonisation - she adores the art of the era, but feels alarmed and horrified by the intrusions of first contact.
Those trees came back to me in my dreams shows at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra from Saturday until February 2.
