Let’s party like it’s 1815
Let’s party like it’s 1815 by Joan Ross is an eight-minute digital artwork on display at the Museum of Sydney that colourfully critiques the legacy of the colonisation of Australia.
Advertisements pervade our lives and our disconnection from nature is like a ravine: narrow and eroded.
Artist Joan Ross assembles what she calls ‘a tableau of greed’, in which colonists display their disregard for nature and self-assumed superiority by partying on land that they have claimed. A fantastical colonial world flecked with Ross’s trademark fluorescent yellow explodes with
fake advertisements for leaf blowers and perfume; mansions, silverware, festivities toasting over ‘their land’; blowflies, bees, celebratory fireworks over a bleak horizon; balloons, lavish curtains, native–non-native plants pollinating with each other, flowers with the heads of colonists; security cameras, butterflies, willy-willies spitting out leather lounges, TVs, lightbulbs, happy couple figurines, pianos, vases, paintings and roast chicken dinners!
Ross presents an insatiable culture of overconsumption, depicting Australian colonisation as ‘a car crash’:
In slow motion we watch the insensitivity and lack of regard – the long-drawn-out slide towards an inevitable crumpled heap. We saw it happening, but we couldn’t stop it; now it’s left for us to clean up.
About Joan Ross
Joan Ross (born in Glasgow) is an Australian artist living in Sydney. Since the late 1980s, Ross has exhibited across a range of mediums, from painting, photography and sculpture to video, installation and virtual reality. Learn more.
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