Dreaming over the rainbow in SALA Festival show at Art Gallery
Artist Troy-Anthony Baylis explores concepts of dreaming, changing SA place names, and postcards with double meanings in his SALA Festival exhibition at the Art Gallery.
Arts
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Lyrics from classic pop hits form a rainbow coloured, visual mix-tape in artist Troy-Anthony Baylis’s new series of works, Them Them Their Dreaming.
The title is a deliberate play on the phrase made famous in Australian film The Castle, while the collages feature quotes about dreams and dreaming from songs by acts ranging from Prince and Kylie to Ratcat and The Masters Apprentices.
“The Dreaming differs across Aboriginal cultures,” said Baylis, who is a descendant of the Jawoyn people from the NT and also has Irish heritage.
“It’s terrific to be intrigued by other cultures … but some things don’t necessarily translate. I just wanted to create an access point by using the pop songs.”
The series is one of three in Baylis’s SALA Festival exhibition at the Art Gallery, including his Postcard works which feature places that could also be the names of drag queens, crafted from Glomesh and faux-mesh.
Baylis created his main Nomenclature series as the recipient of the inaugural $50,000 Guildhouse Fellowship, and says it explores the legacies of colonialism, migration and “historical amnesia”.
It investigates South Australian place names which were changed because of anti-German sentiment after WWI, then changed back in 1935. These are woven with strips of painted canvas, then embroidered with their Aboriginal location names.
For example, Klemzig was renamed Gaza, but was Kaurna land to the Indigenous population.
This year’s Guildhouse Fellow has been named as textile and sculptural artist Dr Sera Waters.