scrub #4, 2003
Type C photograph, number 3 from an edition of 12
75.0
x 127.5
cm
signed, dated and numbered (on the reverse)
SOLD
Provenance
The artist
Corporate collection, Sydney
Exhibited
'The Unquiet Landscapes of Rosemary Laing', Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 23 March - 5 June 2005 (this work was included)
Literature
'The Unquiet Landscapes of Rosemary Laing', Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, exhibition catalogue, illus. p.19
'scrub #4' is part of Rosemary Laing's acclaimed series "one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape", which was staged and shot in the Wirrimanu Aboriginal community's lands around Balgo in the north-east of Western Australia. The work is a stunning example of Laing's signature artistic approach, which involves the staging of elaborate physical interventions and installations within the landscape. Here, various forms of mass-produced modernist furniture have been encrusted in the red soil of the land, taking on the identity and skin of the desert. The generic IKEA-style furniture is poignantly arranged in relation to the landscape as though camouflaged and seeking integration amongst the spinifex mounds. This carefully staged tableaux references the challenges of non-indigenous Australians to relate to a place fraught with colonial histories of dispossession.
Image courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne