Daniel Boyd Treasure Island Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 4 June – 29 January
The first painting inside Daniel Boyd’s Treasure Island asks for the viewer’s time. While the rest of Boyd’s exhibition attests to his capacity for swift impact, Untitled ( ) (2020) is comparatively slower and more soft-spoken. Composed of a series of black and white dots, the diminutive painting presents an ambiguous geometrical form that resists the impatient or passing glance. Which is exactly the point. The sets of evenly distributed white ovals in Untitled ( ) reveal a series of lines that, upon closer inspection, simulate the edges of a three-dimensional cube on the flat canvas. For those willing to look even closer, this geometry references Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker’s 1832 optical illusion, the Necker cube. Necker’s original two-dimensional drawing was famous for resolving into a three-dimensional cube, whose orientation was unfixed, facing either right or left, depending on a viewer’s perception. Critically, a viewer can switch the cube between these opposite positions by choosing to see it one way or the other. Necker used the illusion to suggest the elasticity of human perception and our capacity to shift our most fundamental understanding of reality.
While operating in a different historical and cultural space (Boyd is a Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Yuggera and Bundjalung man with ni-vanuatu heritage), Untitled ( ) does something similar. Appearing at once as a fixed geometry and changing shape in his painting, the partially revealed cube augurs how the exhibition draws upon familiar, seemingly fixed cultural icons to ask for a similar inversion to occur.
A critical recasting of history is taken up in Boyd’s early painting Captain No Beard (2005), in which he borrows directly from the past, turning it upon itself. At first, Captain No Beard seems to slide towards the familiar territory of the commemorative portrait, offering a close approximation of John Webber’s 1782 painting of Captain James Cook. But Boyd refashions Cook from a historical pioneer into a colonial pirate, through the addition of an eyepatch and a parrot. These are simple, comical interventions;
yet each gesture is underwritten by a stinging indictment of colonial violence, and the realities of dispossession. There is something particularly compelling about the use of visual fiction as a way to cut through to historical truth. Boyd’s We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006) extends this logic into history painting, re-presenting Cook’s landing in Kamay/botany Bay in 1770 as a moment of invasion rather than an act of heroic nation-building. Alongside the exhibition’s invocation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous nineteenth-century novel Treasure Island (1882), Boyd’s paintings forcefully expose the fantasies and fictions that marble Australia’s cultural mythology.
Yet Boyd’s most interesting intervention occurs when his painted figures begin to disappear. His work Untitled ( ) (2017) relies on the same appropriative logic as Captain No Beard, taking a c. 1762 portrait of King George III by Allan Ramsay as its inflection point. Rather than diminish the king through the addition of critical iconography, Boyd brings the figure’s very existence into question. Here, George III appears as an abstracted ghost, who only remains visible through a visual matrix of dots. Step closer to the image and the king dissipates into abstraction, move back and he becomes a hazy spectre; semi-erased, and wholly contingent. It’s a striking image, which negotiates the politics of storytelling with the deftest of treatments. The di¬culty for so much current art history comes from the struggle to reckon with the violence of the past without centring the very actors who perpetrated such violence. Boyd offers up a response in the form of a visual paradox that acknowledges and occludes the colonial personage within the space of a single gesture.
Boyd refers to the dots he uses to both describe and withhold information as ‘lenses’. The lenses politicise the very act of seeing, suggesting how presence is negotiated both optically and culturally. Untitled ( ) (2017) pulls into focus Australia’s propagation of plantations and use of slavery in the nineteenth century, depicting a group of men surrounded by sugarcane crops. As his cyphered titles suggest, there are always choices undergirding the stories that we tell and those that we omit. But Boyd’s lenses extend beyond his canvas. Throughout the museum, he has a¬xed black vinyl riddled with holes to the windows, creating hundreds of tiny apertures for light to pass through. To walk through the exhibition is therefore to become aware of the contingency of light and the unseen darkness of the interstice. Boyd’s singular brilliance lies in his ability to conscript the viewer into the construction of meaning. Here, our own gaze suggests the fight for visibility, and rehearses the very conditions of our untold histories.
Tai Mitsuji