30 Childlike things 31 ARTLINES 3 | 2025 CHILDLIKE THINGS DESTINY DEACON SNAPS BLAK Featuring artists such as Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Nici Cumpston, Michael Cook and more, ‘Snap Blak’ — a new Collection exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island photography, at GOMA — shows works seeking to subvert the disempowering, misrepresentative settler–colonial legacy of photography of this country’s First Peoples, and to assert identity, cultural continuity and belonging. Here, photographic artist and QAGOMA curator Keemon Williams takes a personal approach to selected works in the show by the late Kuku and Erub/Mer artist Destiny Deacon. Like cautionary tales told with a wicked smile and a winking eye, Destiny Deacon’s catalogue of works is a wealth of material for the photographer in me. Her visions arrive like candid memories preserved in an old family photobook. They responsibly wield potent political context without the burden of needing to satiate anyone. Deacon’s bluntness is punctuated by the respect she has for the childhood subject. While so many lens-based artists attempt desperately to take ‘good’ photos, a rare few like Deacon succeed in capturing truthful ones. Freefall 2001, from her ‘Forced into images’ portfolio, shows an Aboriginal baby doll whose separated head and arms appear to emerge, unnaturally posed, from a white cloud. Deacon’s deliberate choice to frame this image so tightly suggests that the atmospheric shroud is not contained in the immediate view but potentially infinite. It reminds me of ‘the Nothing’, from Wolfgang Petersen’s cult classic film The Neverending Story 1984: a featureless, ever-expanding darkness that encroaches on the land, manifesting as storm clouds. Deacon’s composition wields a similarly ambiguous form. Uncertain if the disconnected doll is in pain or accepting of its fate. The doll’s eyes are merely painted on, but she returns the viewer’s gaze with a knowing glance, mid-flight; Deacon seizes that gaze the same way one would a real-life subject. Anything but gentle, the ‘fall’ appears more like a violent expulsion. To my mind, the scene veers between being a cherub evicted from the heavens, and the sight of a crash-test dummy blown asunder by explosives. Deacon’s polaroids often weaponise items she has referred to as ‘Koori kitsch’ — including fake cultural objects and stereotyped figurines produced for the tourist market from the mid-twentieth century on — to subvert the lens through which Blakness is perceived and reacted to. In Dance little lady 1993, a doll wearing an Aboriginal flag t-shirt is seen across a series of four images. The title implies that the character might be swaying side to side to the 1971 Tina Charles track ‘Dance, little lady, dance’; its disco aura is palpable. Unlike Freefall, however, this ‘little lady’ is thrust into a pitch-black arena. Although the image threatens to be quite sinister, suggesting that she’s ‘performing’, perhaps unwillingly, for the viewer, I read her exertions as a small, shadowy rebellion — Previous pages Destiny Deacon (Creator) / Kuku & Erub/Mer people / Roger Moll, Colour Factory, Melbourne (Printer) / Freefall (from ‘Forced into images’ portfolio) 2001 / Purchased 2004. QAG Foundation
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