Raquel Ormella: I hope you get this. ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street, Acton. Until June 9.
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Raquel Ormella's exhibition, I hope you get this, is a touring show from the Shepparton Art Museum, which after the Drill Hall will travel to Noosa and Penrith.
Ormella, who turns 50 this year, belongs to a generation of artists where painting in art schools was on the nose and the role of the artist was to deconstruct reality and to make subversive objects.
Her exhibition is full of subversive objects realised as embroidery, textiles, banners, videos and installation pieces. She draws heavily on language and symbols, embraces left-wing politics and feminism, and adds a personal dose of nervous anxiety.
However, unlike many artists who have been drawn into this manner of art making and who adopt a strong moralising and didactic tone, Ormella's work sparkles with humour, the intellectual games are quite refined, and the actual craft element in the fabrication of her pieces is of a high order. There is also, and perhaps unintentionally, quite a high degree of lyricism.
The artist is proud of her migrant origins from Western Sydney and ideologically engages with issues confronting the dispossessed, exploited and marginalised elements in our society.
She reserves particular venom for the deceit and policies of John Howard, Tony Abbott and their successors, and the oppressive languages of nationalism and militarism.
Ormella's burnt flag series is a case in point, where the Australian flag, which has been the subject of so much exploitative reverence for crass political purposes, has now been cut up, burnt and deconstructed to reconstitute new realities.
However, unlike many artists who have been drawn into this manner of art making and who adopt a strong moralising and didactic tone, Ormella's work sparkles with humour, the intellectual games are quite refined, and the actual craft element in the fabrication of her pieces is of a high order.
The artist observes: "I started with the idea to erase the Australian flag with its own motifs. I took the Federation Star and those that make up the Southern Cross and repeated these across the field of the flag by burning small holes and dots, reminiscent of central desert painting, into the negative space. In this way, the flag became a Milky Way of potentially different constellations and connections."
This led to her Poetic Possibility works, including New constellation #1 (2013) and Return to the beginning (2013), where the flag has been so stripped bare and emptied of content that invariably a new content seeps into this newly created void.
Some of the most poignant pieces in the exhibition belong to her Wealth for toil series.
The title finds its origins in the Australian national anthem but the golden rewards glowing in the gold and green of Australia's national colours fail to deliver for working people as the decay sets in. The breakdown and erosion of surfaces create these rather quiet, sad and meditative pieces.
A residency in Yogyakarta was the catalyst for her City without crows (2018) - an effective environmental protest about humankind's coexistence with the natural environment.
While some artists leave you pondering how it was done, Ormella forces you to confront what is being said.