DANIE MELLOR
The big-living American author Ernest Hemingway and the Book of Ecclesiastes might seem like odd bedfellows, but artist Danie Mellor draws on their shared certainties in the title and temporal concerns of his latest exhibition, The Sun Also Sets. Taken from a biblical line and the name of Hemingway’s acclaimed 1926 novel about post-war dissipation and the powers of nature — those four small words prime for Mellor’s visual missive on lost generations, life cycles and the meaningless of man within their endless repeat.
“I point to that specific period of late colonialism; that time of fundamental change for Aboriginal people,” says Mellor of the late 19th century when early ‘modernism’ in all its so-called civilising and mechanising guises began its impact on Indigenous cultural practice, land and family lives. “But at the same time that sense of deep remembering, foregrounding the fact that we can’t escape the cycles of life — we are part of an intrinsic plan.”
Speaking from his studio in Bowral, NSW, by dint of travel restrictions impeding access to his source material in Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands (home to his maternal Mamu and Ngadjon ancestors) and his exhibition launch in Melbourne, Mellor laughs at the irony of talking about life’s intrinsic plan when it has put paid to his.
“Yes, the stakes are in some way different this year,” he says in light of COVID-19 messing with general art practice and the promotion of it. “I had a full year of projects scheduled and had to put all forward focus on work, but in really unintended ways, the impact of the pandemic has tied in with my broader themes of loss, separation, distance and timelessness. The circumstance of now has unfolded interesting relationships and reinforced how interconnected we are to the world around us.”
These revelations conceal in the sepia seductions of The Sun Also Sets, large works that montage infrared photography, archival film and painting. Their conflation of past, present and future — an evanescing of all time explained by the ‘Everywhen’ in Indigenous culture and explored by quantum physics — calls the viewer to consider the framing, translating and transformation of history through a colonising lens.
“Some moments from archival photographs are reimagined and re-imaged as paintings,” says Mellor of the personal and historic yellowed visages that he ››