As a title, Destination Sydney is not sounding any better with age, but this third instalment of the show is reputedly the last. As with the exhibitions in 2015 and 2018, it’s a collaboration between three of Sydney’s leading public venues: the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Mosman Art Gallery, and the Manly Museum and Art Gallery, each showing work by three Sydney artists.
Most artists are happy for any opportunity to display their work, and Destination Sydney allows participants the luxury of a mini-survey. The exhibition is subtitled The Natural World, which suggests a focus on landscape, but this is essentially a women’s show. The nine artists and nine catalogue essayists are female, and the gallery directors’ foreword makes the curatorial intention explicit, calling for a reconsideration of the legacy of Sydney’s female artists. Is there anything intrinsically feminine about “the natural world”? It seems like a very old-fashioned piece of gyno-romanticism.
There are only loose affinities between artists in each component. Manly is probably the most disjointed, with Joan Ross’s historical satires, Merran Esson’s distinctive ceramics, and Fiona Lowry’s airbrushed paintings. For more than a decade, Ross has been making multimedia works that borrow imagery from the early days of settlement to cast a parodic light on our national origins and character. It’s telling that she favours the pictures of Joseph Lycett, who was transported for forgery, and re-convicted of the same offence. Most of Ross’s works could be described as tongue-in-cheek “forgeries”.
All the birds in these pictures seem to have no heads, as if they’ve been blown off by gun-happy colonists. View of Manly, land of the tame, uses a Lycett view as a backdrop for a woman in a Georgian-era dress in an unlikely shade of hi-vis yellow. She is accompanied by a colonial version of a kangaroo with a matching fluoro collar, perched obediently atop a pedestal. Both woman and nature have been “tamed” in this suburb, named by Captain Arthur Phillip after the “manly” aspect of the inhabitants.
