‘Smart Lasso and Details of Disquiet’ presents the studio outcomes of Sally Molloy’s PhD research, which responds to the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and ongoing processes of colonisation in Australia from a white, non-Indigenous perspective. Utilising processes of digital collage and painting, these works locate and visualise everyday manifestations of colonisation so as to acknowledge that colonisation is an everyday process perpetrated by everyday people living their everyday lives. They are indeed visual manifestations of Molloy’s personal situatedness in relation to ongoing colonisation.
The details of this situatedness are evident in Molloy’s own backyard, habits, and possessions: home-made crocodile costumes, fluoro barrier mesh, a chalky gas meter, invasive plant species, and gum blossoms on a doona cover, for example. These elements are photographed, lassoed, and spliced together with snippets from the Australian landscape painting tradition, a process that Molloy conceptualises (vis a vis Donna Haraway) in terms of ‘staying with the trouble’ of landscape, and whiteness, in order to respond.
Molloy’s images – loaded with visual ricochets, echoes, and repetitions – evoke a sense of other reverberations: those of colonisation reverberating through history, re-emerging anew in the present moment. Their dynamic disjointed surfaces glitch and jolt, start and stop, coax and repel, yield and resist; refusing to settle into either a cohesive visual field or a neat idea. These works intentionally avoid resolving tensions, answering questions, offering solutions, or ameliorating disputes. Rather, they might be apprehended in terms of ‘living with’—of feeling more intimately—details of the ways in which colonisation persists in personal and everyday terms.
__________________
Exhibition Dates: 24 November – 5 December
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am to 4pm
Where: POP Gallery, 381 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, 4006
