MELBOURNE.- Sullivan+Strumpf are now presenting the Melbourne solo exhibition debut of Palawa artist Jemima Wyman, World Cloud, opening today and continuing to Saturday 9 September 2023. An opening celebration will officially launch the exhibition on Saturday 19 August, 3pm to 5pm.
Born in Sydney, raised in North Queensland (Dysart, Moranbah, Tolga, and Mackay), and based primarily in Los Angeles for nearly two decades, Wyman’s internationally acclaimed photo collage practice is informed by an ongoing interest in global activism.
Her pieces often appear as a single billowing cloud of smoke, arising from a singular catastrophe, but on closer inspection, the viewer realises each of Wyman’s artworks comprise hundreds, sometimes thousands of images, documenting protests across the globe.
Gleaned from online sources, visual snippets of haze-filled scenes representing diverse international stories of uprising and dissent are re-imagined as a unified representation of visual resistance. The source of each image painstakingly chronicled in what Wyman has come to think of as a “World Atlas of Dissent”.
From organised gatherings and spontaneous uprisings, actions of both the political left and right pool together as scenes from Kyiv, Warsaw, Washington, Minneapolis, New Delhi, Hong Kong, and Melbourne become one dense cloud in which the human figures are typically concealed or obscured.
Compelled to acknowledge these individuals and their actions, the full titles of Wyman’s collages are pages long and include details of every protest represented – by cause, place, and date. For example, the full title of Plume 20, 2022, recently exhibited as part of Air, at Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, runs to 12,914 words.
In World Cloud Wyman continues her exploration of human response to global events; and expands her oeuvre with the introduction of two new series of works.
At the end of the day Wyman’s studio floor is covered in off-cuts, their origins untraceable. A mass of photo remnants, “declassified” from her image archive. For the last few years, she has wondered about the potential for this material and started to see chance compositions and synchronistic moments in the images.
In her Declassified series she highlights constellations of protestors who have fallen out of the fold, against blank backgrounds where smoke once existed.
A second new series created from discarded and damaged photo pieces from Wyman’s studio floor are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s A Deluge (1517-1518); and speak to the cataclysmic climate moment of our time. In the Distress series, dirty scuffed and scarred photo remnants are laid over each other on the scanner, highlighting the scarring of images that themselves often depict sorrow, pain, or anxiety.
One of the world’s most highly respected collage artists, Wyman’s work has been collected by the Whitney Museum (USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), National Gallery of Australia and 21st Century Museum of Art, Japan.
Wyman will also present a series of talks and workshops in Melbourne throughout August and will be part of next year’s PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography.
Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne
Jemima Wyman, World Cloud
August 17th, 2023 - September 9th, 2023
