5 minute read

Karla Dickens: Cover-Up

from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Australia and Singapore - June/July 2022

by sullivanstrumpf

from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Australia and Singapore - June/July 2022 , page 22

Article from: Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Australia and Singapore - June/July 2022

Dawn Ng: London Bound

By Daniel Browning

The latest series of works by Karla Dickens represent a paradigm shift—or at least a more minimalist approach—in her wide-ranging practice as an installation artist. As a creator of maximal environments, she re-presents found objects to expose their barely concealed history as once functional moving parts in the complex perpetual machine of Australian settler colonialism. In Dickens’ previous work, objects that seem to have been liberated from their purpose or intended use—straitjackets, fencing masks, abandoned farm machinery, a discarded Australian flag, ethnographic postcards inscribed with racist messages—are deconstructed, subversively remade and rehabilitated.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are advised that this article contains images of deceased persons and includes images and themes that may be distressing.

**Karla Dickens Soldiering On (detail), 2022 mixed media 125 x 125 cm**

Cover-up

In days of libraries and books some searched for answers facts, knowledge and histories others for justification or fantasy books held up as gospel upright black-and-white truth-tellers write as crime-concealing magicians Covering-up

The words of writers giving birth to authority perpetrators of misleading concealment scandalous creatives masking one-sided evidence white-washed reality with educated vocabulary sealed with gold embossed titles honourable biased a mass-formulated instruction prompting signals to deflect guilt illusory narratives sold as best-selling must-haves Covering-up

Pages fail to speak words of the many wrong-doings only by the ‘others’ the bad, the native and the unknowing strings of tightly-woven deceptions bound together painting pretty pictures for the faint-hearted keeping unethical acts of the real villains hidden avoiding silent criticism Breaching duty of trust or committing crime Covering-up

Drawn to a book by its cover foundation make-up screening ugly truths hard words missing under hardcovers passive non-telling and word twisting adventures reader beware as you grip a dusty jacket be active in discovering lies between the lines not all pictures are worth a thousand words listen to spoken words from those not found in books Re-write the cover-up

Hers is an environmentally sustainable practice which recasts the discarded, broken, and obsolescent into new schemes in an almost Duchampian process of upcycling or creative reuse. Her interventions however function politically, in that they unmake a unilateral national story into a set of counter-narratives where Aboriginal people are not victims but empowered agents of history, actors rather than extras in the strange, nihilistic epic film that is Australia. In every sense, her practice is regenerative. Even as she fossicks at the tip or browses auctions online, Dickens is engaged in the work of salvage and repair.

In Cover-Up, Dickens breaks the spine of books that recall the mythos of white heroes clearing the land and reclaiming it for their own, in a true boys’ own adventure punctuated by royal visits, souvenir cut-outs and orgiastic mythmaking. There is something ritual in the unbinding of these relics of white Australia, as if the artist is undoing their claim to historical truth or cultural value. Exposed and hollowed out, their textual meaning has well and truly been exhausted. They are now simply objects of curiosity—part of our national detritus, to be upcycled or buried in landfill. Broken, cut up and recombined in these subtly beautiful works however, they strike me as somehow fixed—cleansed by the artist in a redemptive act of aestheticisation, in effect overwriting their unilateral purpose as mythmaking propaganda.

When I first met Karla Dickens, she was producing seemingly domestic and—dare I say it— feminine collages with fabric and lace, belying their deeper meaning. I have watched the scope of her work enlarge in ways that I could never have imagined, to be almost monumental in scale, A Dickensian Country Show (commissioned for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 2020) for example. When I visited her studio in early 2022, and first saw the eviscerated cloth-bound books in Cover-Up, neatly laid out in grids on a worktable, she admitted that perhaps she was becoming more subtle in her old age. Dickens was almost apologetic. I don’t buy it. There is no mellowing, but a seductive appeal to our national subconscious to tell the hard truth, whatever the implications for our collective sense of self. To every object she remakes and manufactures into tightly curated individual works she ascribes new political meaning, subverting and rehabilitating them in the process. Artists such as Dickens create the world they wish to inhabit, and hers is one where the self-delusion, lies and dissembling that characterise the rhetorical way in which Australian history is taught, and the brutality and violence that was covered up, are exposed to blinding ultraviolet light. Laid bare like unearthed bones, these relics of our collective past are only recirculated—or upcycled— to disfigure them with ritual spine-breaking and bury the unreconstructed, one-sided metanarrative which they inscribed with a kind of ceremony. Don’t avert your eyes. Hope is radical, and Dickens work to rehabilitate these objects demonstrates her own belief in the regenerative process, echoed in the trajectory of her own life. As she writes in her poetic essay accompanying this exhibition:

Drawn to a book by its cover

Foundation make-up screening ugly truths

Hard words missing under hard covers

Passive non telling and word twisting adventures

Readers beware as you grip a dusty jacket

Be active in discovering lies between the lines

Not all pictures are worth a thousand words

Listen to the spoken words from those not found in books

Re-write the cover-up