I'm Going

Comprising a suite of new paintings alongside an extraordinary three-panelled mirrored work, I’m Going, Daniel Boyd’s tenth exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, continues his incisive investigation into history. Taking visual references from mid-century children’s educational pamphlets – comic-strip style social studies texts from the 1950s that once presented a reductive, one-sided account of Australia’s colonial past – Boyd uses his signature pointillist technique to redact and disrupt these narratives. In doing so, he creates images that speak to the instability of historical truth and the ongoing possibility of re-reading the past.

Parallels can be traced to the work of Gordon Bennett, who drew from the very the same educational material some forty years earlier and to whom Boyd offers both visual and conceptual homage. Within this exhibition, we become immersed in an oscillating environment: floating in the murky waters of imperialism, Boyd’s lenses open a space in which we can enter Australia’s painful past. In these blurred edges – where images dissolve, fragment and re-form – we begin to see more clearly. Like Boyd’s lenses, we attempt to map time and place together, unfolding our own histories as we move through the space, held in a poetic liminality and drawn into a cyclical dance.

With astute rhythmic timing, Boyd grants us authorship – to explore his story, to tell our own, to connect across the continuum of time and to reckon with the darkest of global histories – within a vast field of shimmering reflections that ebb and flow with the ocean tide.