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TROY EMERY

hen Troy Emery is
quizzed about the
recent shift in his
sculptures’ subject
W and surface matter,
the Melbourne-based artist, best known for
approximating the naturalism of animals
with an unnatural confection of tassels and
acid tones, talks of “cataclysm”.
You can call it the effect of an interminable
lockdown which led to a deep-dive into the
digital film archives of the British Museum
amd coincided with an invitation from a regional Victorian gallery to exhibit, says THIS PAGE, FROM TOP Breathing exercises (2022) mixed media
the artist of the circumstance that scalded his typically colourful posturing of art installation, pictured at Hamilton Regional Gallery flanked by
pets into a pink lumpiness. “But I began obsessing over lost moments in time — The Wannon Falls (1860) artwork by Thomas Clark (on left) and
Mt Abrupt, the Grampians (1864) artwork by Nicholas Chevalier.
watching the scholarly likes of Mary Beard pulling back to AD79 when Mount
Cowboy’s companion (2021) mixed media installation; and
Vesuvius erupted and buried everyday life around the Bay of Naples under lava. Prismatic being (2021) mixed media installation, all by Troy Emery.
“All those Pompeiian bodies were forever preserved by a cataclysm,” he adds,
noting that his online historical tripping played on his creative psyche, so much
that when Hamilton Gallery invited him to exhibit he was primed to materialise
a meltdown. “The one stipulation made by Joshua White, the gallery director, was
that I come and respond to the gallery’s context and collection, which I understood
to be eclectic, old and rich in 19th century European landscapes.”
Emery describes finding real 19th century masters in a faux 19th century
southern Grampians building made “piss-elegant” in the 1970s “with lots of
timber panelling, dinky Murano chandeliers, arched doorways, green floral
wallpaper and a grand piano plonked right in the middle of the main space”.
“What do people expect from a regional gallery exhibition?” he asks rhetorically,
only to answer with “a conservative appreciation of a particular type of art”;
the studied, European-centric style of which he felt obliged to flip.
Emery cherry-picked from the gallery’s “impressive” collection of 19th-century
Australian landscapes, all gilt-framed idylls of the mother country, and put them
in “prop” service of his new gormless sculptures, holistically cast in textiles toned
an excoriated pink that is both girly and burn-back gruesome. “I’m interested in
these entire cities in China just pumping out megatons of pink polyester tassels.
I mean, what is that stuff for?” he says of his chosen materiality. “The implied
value of colour and material casting is so interesting in a country town. I mean,
how do you cater to ‘taste’ but deliver it with a weirdly exciting flavour?”
Emery painted gallery walls in a “garish bile green”, suggestive of Vesuvius’s toxic
gases and inserted his confusion of real and replicate classicism into its volatile
ether. He undermined the highbrow conceptualism of cataclysm with a kitschy PHOTOGRAPHERS: TROY EMERY; ANNIKA KAFCALOUDIS (GALLERY)
vanity, pushing the gallery’s grand piano into the implied doom and declaring his
work done. “The levity, the landscape, the crazy wildlife, the dumb innocence, the
implied menace, the isolation that preserves it all: there is something cool going on
in this country that couldn’t repeat anywhere else,” he says, sharing that the impost
of regional context will continue in his show with Kate Rohde at Horsham Regional
Gallery in July. “I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface.
troyemery.net martinbrownecontemporary.com

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