Artist: Danie Mellor

Tolarno Galleries presents Danie Mellor’s new exhibition of mixed-media works, Awake (in the Dream).

On display across both gallery spaces, this commanding new series is a recent pivot in Mellor’s approach to his imagery, combining painting and photography in each of the works.

“The images are both painterly and photographic,” Mellor says of the unique works. “Each piece combines mediums that are important in my research and practice, so they almost transcend categorisation.’

The layered pictorial elements in this body of work are composed of photographs by Mellor and historical images, including portraits and postcards taken in the late 19th and early 20thCenturies by photographers such as Alfred Atkinson and Dr Walter Roth, the protector of Aboriginals in Queensland.

Mellor creates a visual archaeology of old and new. His photographs, captured using available-light and infrared cameras, offer colour-toned, transcendent glimpses of the rainforest and landscape in and around the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns, the Country and landspaces of his matrilineal Ngadjon-Jii ancestry and heritage.

“The landscapes I’m working with are from northern Queensland, and I’ve opened the sky as a kind of living, permeable tondo, or place to reveal and see into different worlds,” he says. “I’m also using bodies of water – rivers, lakes – to reflect the sky, or the intangible and the invisible, alerting us to the idea of multiple worlds interacting.”

“I’m still thinking about the collapse of time in my work,” he adds. “By merging the boundaries of landscape and ethereal rainforests, I’m evoking presence through ancestral legend and a Dreaming space that filters through to this world. Both worlds interact with, and co-create, each other.”

Through the subtle interplay of photographic image and paint, Mellor coaxes a metaphysical, even supernatural, quality from the landscape – and the figures in the landscape.

“The palette in my earlier work was more constrained, and focused on particular hues and tones,” he says. “These works are vibrant with broader spectrums of colour, which offers a more magical experience of landscape.”

Making water-based washes and glazes from pigment powder, Mellor paints the canvas in skeins of colour, from all-over iridescent patinas to targeted chromatic interventions in glowy fluoro pink.

“I like to cross over and experience the work in a different way,” says Mellor. “Some of the iridescence is quite ghostly – I’ve disrupted the surface and allowed a certain freedom for the pigments and washes to create their own movements over the canvas, suggesting a dynamic sort of shift of vision across the picture plane. It’s a great way of working and surrenders some of the control in the creative process.”

Several of the works map out a multi-layered landscape with cane fields and reflective bodies of water in the foreground and Mount Bartle Frere in the background.

“Choorechillum, or Bartle Frere, is the highest mountain in Queensland and it’s incredibly significant for Ngadjon-Jii People as a Story Place both for women and men,” explains Mellor.

“In the artwork imagery, you can see cultivation in the cane fields just beyond the river and a couple of homesteads, so there is change and shift and temporality in the image. Past, present and future are all happening at the same time: ancestral legends aren’t in the past, they’re unfolding now.”

A pair of works – one diurnal, the other nocturnal – depicts three Aboriginal men in cockatoo-feather ceremonial dress, standing like giants above a river that reflects their figures.

“In these works I’m thinking about the presence and enormity of ancestor and ancestral legend,” says Mellor. “There’s a certain unreality that suggests ancestral presence looming large within the landscape.”

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a Marlene Dietrich song, 'Awake in a Dream', recorded in 1936 for 'Desire', a crime comedy she starred in with Gary Cooper.

“There is no obvious connection,” laughs Mellor. “Dietrich was singing a love song about being enchanted by the dream or imagination of someone. But then again, there is a connection, because for me, the work in Awake (in the Dream), is about being aware and open to different kinds of realities where material and immaterial spaces somehow connect. It’s a love affair with the landscape and the worlds around us”