Destiny Deacon: Showing colour
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When I look at the works of Destiny Deacon I feel overwhelmed and elated, sickened and elevated. If I look deeper into those works, examine them more closely, I am lost in the narrative. Deeper into thought, into myself, with intense examination of the internal self and the external art, I think I can understand them. Deacon’s work is profound and often challenging to unpack …
Despite or perhaps because of their apolitical-seeming, bordering-on-superficial visual content – blak dollies and blacker comedy are frequent tools – the works of Destiny Deacon are intensely political. They speak strongly of dispossession, displacement, death and destruction, of the rape and torture of Indigenous women …
There is a lot to love and a lot to hate about Deacon’s work, and the love-hate dichotomy is so destabilised as to be useless as a tool for understanding. I love the body of work because of the power of the narrative in the works. I hate it because much of it is far from pleasant to look at. I love it because of the meaning I can extract …
Overall, because of the power of the work and because the unpleasantness plays a major role in the overall effect the work has, love defeats hate and the works of Deacon almost always touch me, make me think and enrich my life. The things I dislike are also the things I have passionate adoration for …
Deacon’s ancestry lies among the Kuku people from the far north of Queensland and the Erub/Mer people of the Eastern Torres Strait, and she was born in Queensland. However, she grew up in Melbourne and for the most part that metropolis is home. Politics, the light of the city, the life of the city, the colours and energy of Melbourne: they are all embedded within the work …
I am always struck by the colours Deacon creates in her work. None of the colours is quite what we expect; they are saturated or muted in ways that cannot be arbitrary, in ways that can only be genius. Yellows are never just yellow, reds are never simply red. The palette, coming as it does from photography, from film, from light itself, is surrealist and faintly disturbing …
Red, yellow and black are the colours of the Aboriginal flag, designed by Luritja man Harold Thomas in 1971. Deacon’s disturbed version of those colours suggests the watering down of our blood and culture, the destruction of our country, the legal systems that are pitched so often against us. Even Aboriginal flags, present in the art on clothing and scatterings elsewhere, are stripped back in saturation …
Deacon’s worldview is, to me, well represented by the slightly sick palette: the black not black enough, the red not quite red, the yellows perhaps intentionally unsettling. It could be argued that one role of art and of artists is to unsettle the viewer, and Deacon’s work does that perfectly. Her work unsettles the gaze of the white viewer just as the white people unsettled our people …
Sick diluted blood-red-pink, slick unpleasant yellow, faded black, the colours of our flag diluted, disturbed, distressed. The palette suggests Indigenous disadvantage and the long-term effects of fighting a culture war while in a permanent state of losing. Deacon, with little more than simple props and a camera, can teach us what Australia is, and how that challenges who we think Australians are.
Claire G. Coleman, Melbourne
This is an edited excerpt of the author’s essay commissioned for and published in the catalogue to accompany the (temporarily closed) exhibition ‘DESTINY’, at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Melbourne until 31 January 2021.
