Joan Ross has long used her multidisciplinary practice—which spans drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, video animation and installation—to explore the enduring legacy of colonialism in Australia, and how colonial systems are entrenched in our museums and collections. Vibrant scenes of flora and neon are used to attract a viewer, before quickly revealing a sinister world of Indigenous exploitation and environmental degradation.
Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams, the artist’s latest exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), is a retrospective of sorts, showing significant works from throughout her career. But it also takes key pieces from the NPG collection, contextualising historic works within the narrative of colonialism that Ross is challenging. “It’s a brave exhibition for them to put on,” she says, “because I don’t pull my punches in terms of criticism of collections and museums”. The exhibition is curated collaboratively with Ross, Emma Kindred and Coby Edgar, a Larrakia curator who provides a First Nations perspectives on the works.
Included in the show is M’lady Ikebana from 2015, in which a colonial woman clad in Ross’s signature fluorescent yellow makes ikebana from branches reappropriated from a John Glover painting. “But there’s Aboriginal people still in the trees,” says Ross. “She’s doing it with total disregard and total disrespect.” Also included is the Possession series from 2022, in which colourful scenes of picturesque landscapes surround a central model advertising a new perfume, ‘Possession’, for the colonial consumer. “Landscape is a softer way to talk to people, to engage them rather than becoming hostile,” Ross says. “But in a way, I am quite hostile. I’m dogged about it. I don’t like things thrown in my face either, so if a work can hold all the issues I want it to, but I can do it in a playful way, that’s what I’ll do.”
Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams
National Portrait Gallery
On now—27 April
Joan Ross Solo Exhibition
N. Smith Gallery
24 April—17 May 2025
This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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