Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams is a vibrant and dynamic exhibition by acclaimed contemporary artist Joan Ross. In a practice that spans collage, printmaking, sculpture and video animation, Ross probes the ongoing consequences of colonisation in Australia with wit and wry critique. Transforming scenes from colonial artworks through a digital ‘cut and paste’ technique and her signature fluorescent yellow, Ross explores critical issues like climate change, greed and consumerism.
1 M'lady Ikebana, 2015 Joan Ross. Courtesy of the artist. 2 Portrait of Dr Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George Forster, c. 1780 Jean Francois Rigaud.
For this exhibition, Ross was invited to select portraits from the National Portrait Gallery collection and situate them alongside her own artworks. The result considers how colonial artworks are contextualised within cultural institutions and asks us to question stories within the archives of history.
The show was curated collaboratively by Joan Ross, Coby Edgar and Emma Kindred, reflecting First Nations and non-First Nations perspectives on colonial narratives in the collection.
