TREASURE ISLAND, unapologetically opaque and astute in ancestral vitality, leads audiences to uncover a shimmering, effervescent ‘X marks the spot’ – exchanging bejewelled chests of gold and silver for a prize far richer in value, as Boyd re-contextualises what it means to comprehend Australian/Melanesian history through his own esoteric lens. Plunged under a deep and tempestuous ocean of white colonial veracity, we remain breathless; too short to ever understand the generational trauma of Australia’s concealed slave labour, yet long enough to accept the responsibly of acknowledging the reified Indigenous narrative as we drift in a pulsing current of perspectivism.
Hailing from Cairns, Queensland, Boyd belongs to the Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, Kudjula, Ghungalu, Wangerrriburra and Yuggera peoples, as well as upholding ancestral ties to the Pacific Islands. Heritage and legacy super-charge the energy of the final room within the exhibition, with several portraits of the artist’s Grandmother, a dreamy memory of a childhood birthday party, a slow-moving 4 man canoe and the silent assertiveness of his 2014 work, Untitled (PW) commanding the space with a withheld ambiguity. An astute reference to the displacement of Vanuatu and Solomon Island identities lost to the ethnological archives, these figures are unidentified and uninterested – not petrified as consumable objects, rather retaining their identities behind Boyd’s effervescent lenses.
The middle room, peppered with the infamous No Beard works of his early career, deeper explore themes of exoticism, colonial modernist preoccupations as well as the sugarcane plantations of the mid-19th century most deftly addressed in 2017’s Untitled referenced from a photograph taken on a Queensland plantation. As we stumble through thick vegetation in this work, we are halted by the stare of the incongruous white surveyor, looking over his flock of labourers, unaware of the eyes that would now gaze back over him as agency is silently, yet fearlessly exchanged within the contemporary space of the gallery. Acknowledgement, as we move around this room, becomes the key to the adorned treasure chest that is Boyd’s practice.
Floating back towards the mouth of the cave, we find ourselves at the entrance of Treasure Island, emerging from the deep sea of a reconsidered history to arrive at daybreak in Untitled (DCPC) 1-6. With oil, charcoal and archival glue, Boyd provides the necessary tools to withstand his allegory to Plato’s cave, tangling reality with illusion as we survey the series of vivid inkblot-esque glimpses of flora and fauna. Entrenched within the dots/lenses that inform the exhibit, we find solace in the movement they espouse as they uniformly dazzle in the light, leaping from one canvas to another in unison; affording the collection with a three-dimensional depth that opens its arms and invites us in. It is within this very openness that Boyd differs from his contemporaries.
The ancestral presence within his practice is far from an ancillary addition, and as we are so graciously offered the oars to glide through this anthology of events, it becomes our responsibility to occupy this space with utmost care as we are given the unavoidable choice to sink or swim.
The Daniel Boyd exhibition TREASURE ISLAND is on view at the Art Gallery Of New South Wales until the 29th January, 2023 and is a free exhibition.