Double Yolker - by Mish Meijers
ISLAND | ISSUE 156
OH SHIT! Please don’t go, 2018,
single channel video, 3 minutes 55 seconds
— text by Tricky Walsh
These are not things you will ever see.
Meijers is constructing images and objects that merge politics with theatre (as if that needs to be consciously done). She is allowing us an audience with everything that exists behind closed doors, and she is putting a spotlight on it, and as it stands, sweaty and blinking out at the darkness and forgetting its lines, she is sticking the knife in, and playing for the dramatic finale.
These are images and objects that we are familiar with. Sort of. They are gatherings of people, or images or totems that stand in for those people. Are they at a protest or at a bus stop or at the theatre? They are full of the energy of the possible, and they are terrible with their intimacy – do we know these people? Why do they move with such overstated gestures? It’s a kind of dance, and a kind of ritual, and it’s obviously symbolic but what’s with the ghosts and the snowmen?
Are they the possibilities that have ended, or the ones that have frozen in time – the memories we have or the misconceptions we carry in life, hovering behind us persistently. They inhabit these ephemeral dreamscapes – reminders of the choices we have and have not made, the things that haunt us that never quite go away – they are part of our cast after all; the things that make up our own personal theatre, even if they take up the smallest of non-speaking roles.
In the gallery, we are confronted by large paintings that feel like sets. We stand in front of them and we are not sure if we are the players or the played. Open a newspaper at the moment and we’re still not sure. These works allow us to disappear into the between state, where what is happening might not actually be. Somewhere stage left is a Greek chorus letting us know the truth of the situation, but we can’t quite make out the words; the music has drowned them out.
Double yolker! It is the surprise of the unexpected. It’s walking around a familiar street corner and finding unfamiliar terrain. In this gallery it is a cacophony of paintings, ceramics and video work that seduce us with their palettes and their compositions while alluding to the state of the world we inhabit. It’s a seductive voice though; we want to listen, we’re itching to be moved. ▼
Greek Chorus member 3;
the choir was much more than anticipated,
2018, glazed earthenware ceramics, 24 x 19 x 20 cm
Impossible Opera: Parliamentarian Wrestlemania, 2018,
oil on glass, 75 x 95 cm
Double Yolker!, 2018, installation shot
Double Yolker! was exhibited at Bett Gallery, Hobart, in September–October 2018.
All images courtesy of Bett Gallery, Hobart and the artist.
Tricky Walsh is a non-binary interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in New Norfolk, Tasmania. Walsh is represented by Bett Gallery in Hobart and Mars Gallery in Melbourne.
This arts feature appeared in Island 156 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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