Daniel Boyd: Pineapples in the Pacific

Overview

Daniel Boyd is a re-maker of Australian history. Through artistic methods of satire and appropriation, he deconstructs narratives of British imperialism and confronts the dark undercurrents that whitewash our sense of national identity and culture. Drawing upon 18th and 19th century paintings, he subtly inverts heroic depictions of colonial conquest into portraits of invasion, rampant with buccaneers and profiteers.

In a slight change of pace, Boyd’s current exhibition, Pineapples in the Pacific, revolves around Pentecost Island in the South Pacific, the birthplace of his paternal great great grandfather. Based on photographs taken during a series of Anglican Melansian missions in 1906, Boyd approaches these images with contemporary candour and an eye for satire, amplifying their residual flavours of exoticism and ‘otherness’.

As well as stitching and unstitching the flexible fabric of history, Boyd also reworks the traditional aesthetic of Aboriginal dot painting, merging together abstraction and figuration. His series of untitled paintings are veiled by glossy, translucent dots of archival glue. These dots, whilst adding brilliant textural complexity, are allowed to converge like raindrops. They appear to function as miniature lenses that distort and magnify the content. This masking and manipulation of perspective means you have to dig deep to discern the details. Like subjective histories, Boyd is perhaps emphasising subjective modes of seeing.

Upon entering the gallery space, a picturesque coastal landscape looms large. Coloured with luminous blues and greens, it teems with tropical allure. Whilst the work is a postcard perfect capturing of foreign beauty, with the elevated viewpoint and the historical context, there is a creeping sense that we are seeing through the possessive lust of the coloniser.

Interesting also is Boyd’s curiously isolated pineapple. It is as if he is harnessing this well-worn icon of lush utopia and using it as an ironic statement, implying that it masks a set of derogatory racial and cultural assumptions. Boyd’s re-worked portraits are more obviously rooted in archival photography. In his shadowy representations of indigenous figures, an elder man is dressed in ceremonial garb and weaponry, whilst in another work, there is a faint echo of Gauguin’s Tahitian muse, summoning up the notion of ‘exotic beauty’. You get the feeling that the original photography was guided by the antiquated stock character of ‘the noble savage’; however, Boyd’s elusive and monochromatic reproduction of them suggests that this romantic notion is a blurry memory — that there is something intangible and out of reach about this identity.

The locale may be different, but Boyd's magnified and reworked reproductions continue to be subtle provocations of Western colonialism and their shifting approaches to 'otherness'. It's one case where a pineapple is most definitely not just a pineapple.