Bright before your eyes

SOME suggest the best way to make something ‘‘disappear’’ is to hide it in plain sight. In Joan Ross’s optically challenging new show, the artist has made a baroque installation of lounge suites and sideboards crammed with kitsch Australiana, all of it painted in the brilliant yellow of high-visibility safety vests.

The result is fascinating and slightly nauseating. As the various elements of the installation blend together into a bizarre zone of yellow, your eye skips across the installation to take in various weird details: a headless Captain Cook doll, a plastic mounted deer’s head, a 3D baby portrait or some other example of Ross’s refined, but gaudy, sense of humour.

Enter at Your Own Risk is a commentary on the way our incomplete understanding of history leads us to a fundamentally skewed view of the landscape itself.

Ross makes this idea explicit in a series of works that riff on the paintings of Joseph Lycett, a convicted forger who, although famous for having painted the 18th-century landscapes of Tasmania, may have never actually been there. In the video When I Grow Up I Want To Be a Forger (2010), Ross animates elements from various Lycett paintings to satirise Australia’s obsession with occupational health and safety.

In this country it seems that if you want to make something disappear, all you need to do is surround it with witches’ hats and paint it high-vis yellow and everybody will ignore it.

In Ross’s view, Australia’s Anglo history is a fiction made manifest by the fake antiques we create to celebrate our imaginary past.

JOAN ROSS: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

Until November 13, Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, 285 Young Street, Waterloo, 8399 1240.