Darcy Williams: Cultivating Proxies

Cultivating Proxies is a mediation on possession and contentment set against the dread of late-stage capitalism and the Anthropocene. Darcy Williams assemblages explore how millennials and gen Z affected by a warming planet, a global pandemic, a tilted economy and a rental system pitted against them, cope. Behind many share house doors is a well-curated ecosystem of house plants, that responds to the unique needs of the individuals who live there. As we slowly open our homes and share physical spaces once again, we are ambushed by monstera, devil’s ivy, philodendron and the temperamental fiddle leaf fig. These plants offer themselves as a kind of emotional surrogate when contextualised by the domestic condition and contemporary painting. Williams paints their community with their proudest propagations, as a way to find connections and as reflections of a cautious but bonded community. A community unified in the turmoil of twenty-first-century dread.

Darcy Williams is an emerging artist, queer person and arts-worker living and working in Brisbane/ Meanjin. Williams’s practice is based in painting and draws on art history and the political and emotional concerns of domestic and everyday life. Using the every day as a psychological space for larger issues to be played out and investigated. The works tend to reveal themselves as realist images of people and their immediate surrounding, set against painterly fields or voids. The positioning of many images within the same object context encourages a more holistic representation of the subject. The way an image can be built to represent a distillation of multiple reference points is paramount to their practice.

Rosie Hazell is a Curator, Dramaturg and arts worker from Brisbane/ Meanjin. Rosie is interested in the ephemeral nature of site specific installation and performative works. More specifically how to capture or hold onto memory and intangibility. Rosie seeks to challenge dominant hegemonic perspectives on interdisciplinary art practice and viewership; to provide engaging, dynamic and thought-provoking interactions with art.

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