Dean Cross
VAULT talks to artist Dean Cross about his First Nations heritage and the legacy of the past.
Image credit: Installation view Dean Cross, Monuments, 2018–ongoing indefinitely, 2020 iteration, Ngunnawal ochre and gold leaf, dimensions variable, in Drawn by stones, 2020-21, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Photo: Kai Wasikowski
Dean Cross has just returned to his artist residency studio, his ‘laboratory’ space by the busy Eveleigh railway lines in inner Sydney. Painted canvases, photographic prints and drawings fill the walls, the material evidence of exhibitions past, present and future. Much of it felt “foreign, like strangers, ghosts almost” upon his return after the pandemic-induced lockdown of 2021.
One canvas behind the 35-year-old former professional dancer’s workingdesk reads ‘colonialism is the true abstraction’, repeated over and over. There is an overturned waste basket suspended from the ceiling, from which hangs a white bucket with painted text that reads ‘house black’ on the side. This work is called Caliban and will appear in his upcoming commercial show at Yavuz Gallery.
As in previous works, Cross is once again using Western tragedy as a framework for exploring notions of Country, identity and cultural loss. The decolonial conversation such work prompts applies as much today here on the unceded Gadigal land upon which we meet as it did when Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, was written, circa 1610. In the play the Duke of Milan, Prospero, is exiled to an island where he uses magic to enslave the local witch’s son Caliban, whom the bard imagines as half-man, half-monster.
Cross is especially interested in Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s rethinking of The Tempest, whose thesis imagines Shakespeare as a primary witness to the spoils of the early colonial slave trade. The original play is “kind of horrible to read, really, with Prospero as a conquering king taking over Caliban’s country, enslaving him,” explains Cross. “The show is tentatively called Prospero’s Island, thinking about our own island, obviously, but I ...Subscribe to read this article in full
