eX de Medici’s practice focuses on signs of power and control — and on the fragility and brevity of life. Many of her paintings and photographs feature guns and skulls, the swastika and other fascist motifs, as well as symbols from Australia's colonial past; de Medici signals the vulnerability of our own culture through these symbols. She describes the ancient swastika symbols as ‘beautiful signs for ugly people’. In de Medici’s hands, these emblems of aggression and oppression are adorned with elaborate patterning inspired by the natural world and expressed with the skilled methodical strokes of natural history illustration, a genre that has been historically associated with the classification and ordering of the world through colonisation and empire.

The artist’s large watercolours are inspired by particular colours of the spectrum: Blue (Bower) 1998–2000, Red (Colony) 2000 and The theory of everything 2005 in shades of yellow and lilac. The choice of colour is highly emotive, with the yellow and lilac hues not only implying decay and bruising but also the ochre shades of the earth and perhaps even uranium (‘yellow cake’), refined from an open-cut mine, as depicted in the background. The uranium reference is reinforced by the radiation warning symbol on one of the playing cards in the foreground, referencing a sense of gambling with our future. Everywhere images of danger and excess abound: snakes, an automatic pistol, drug-taking paraphernalia, glitzy jewellery, gem stones and luxury car emblems like the Rolls Royce ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ and the BMW badge. There are representations of corruption not only of the physical kind, as implied by the numerous skulls, but also of authority, implied by the legal-wigged skull and police badge in the lower left foreground.

De Medici’s work draws heavily on the symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings; her painting is constructed as a memento mori — a set of visual codes in the vanitas tradition, intended to remind each of us of our own mortality and the futility of worldly pursuits. The disorder and excess of decoration in the work recalls the way seventeenth-century Dutch still life often acted as a sign of ‘the peril of a household losing its moral grip’.¹ The title of the work — The theory of everything — is also a hypothesis of theoretical physics and mathematics that attempts to fully explain and link together all known physical phenomena (a theory explored by twentieth-century physicists as celebrated as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking). In de Medici’s work we have a similar sense of the artist trying to give order or reason to a chaotic, unreasoning world of conflicting desires.

In appropriating such highly charged symbols and re-fashioning them, de Medici forces us to reassess the connections between reality and artifice and to be cautious about fulfilling our desires.

Endnotes

1. Roger Leong, Masters and slaves, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2004, unpaginated.