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, skulls and fascist motifs, as well as her own vocabulary of symbols of colonialism. De Medici often transforms these emblems of violence and oppression with elaborate patterning inspired by the wings of miniscule, unclassified moths viewed under the microscope. Expressed in the skilled, methodical strokes of natural history illustration, she hints at the role of aesthetics and image-making in the classification and ordering of the world through colonisation and empire.

As with the bower bird, the artist has brought together the elements of her large watercolours according to particular colours: Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998–2000, Red (Colony) 2000, The theory of everything 2005 in yellow and lilac, (Mars symbol) Gun(n)s ‘n Styx 2006 in green, and Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006 in shades of black. The choice of colour in the latest work in this series of ‘big’ paintings is highly emotive, with the black hues not only implying death but referencing popular culture — like the Star Wars Darth Vader helmet, which conjures up images of repression and control.

In Live the (Big Black) Dream, images of control abound. De Medici draws attention to the continued significance of the all-seeing eye to contemporary power structures by including a surveillance camera and army binoculars. The ancient inscription, ‘What you are, I was, and what I am, you will be’, reaches a heightened pitch of foreboding; here scattered skulls, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant encased in its own snow-dome sarcophagus and ‘Little Boy’, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, are set against a background of an apocalyptic cloud. More contemporary references are made specifically to Australia with the Deputy Sheriff’s badge in the foreground alluding to satiric accounts of Australia’s alleged role as the United States’ deputy law enforcer in the region.

This work has more of a junkyard aesthetic than the earlier more opulent display of possessions, as in de Medici’s painting The theory of everything 2005. In Live the (Big Black) Dream, we have the detritus of our resource-consuming society — discarded tyres which when set alight will pollute as in the background, with acrid billowing clouds of smoke. The discarded crank shafts and engine parts also found at the dump perhaps also allude to our place as mere cogs in the overpowering machine of state. Additional elements of global consumerism and waste are echoed in the discarded plastic Coke bottle in the foreground.

Finally, while yellow was the colour of materialism for the artist, black is the colour of the end.¹ De Medici’s work extends the symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings; it is not so much a memento mori to remind each individual of his or her own mortality, but a warning to an entire society against the vanity and futility of worldly pursuits. As the artist says, ‘One skull is a memento mori, but many skulls are mass death’.² 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’.³

In the title of the work, the idea of living the dream is about having it all, but the irony is that this dream becomes a nightmare. In de Medici’s work we have a 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, eX de Medici forces us to reassess the connections between reality and artifice.

Endnotes

1. eX de Medici, conversation with Francis E Parker, 19 September 2006.
2. de Medici, conversation with Parker.
3. Roger Leong, Masters and slaves, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2004, unpaginated.