A brilliantly colourful exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery this weekend looks at familiar figures stories from our history and asks questions.

Artist Joan Ross has spent months exploring the Portrait Gallery’s collection, selecting portraits to hang alongside her own artworks as she recontextualises scenes from colonial artworks with a touch of heavy irony.

Historical works from the NPG’s collection, including John Webber’s portraits of Capt James Cook and William Bligh, and Thomas Phillips’ portrait of botanist Joseph Banks, are hung alongside Ross’s signature digital “cut-and-paste” works, as she makes her own wry critique of the history of colonisation in Australia.

The winner of the 2017 Sulman Prize, Joan Ross won the Mordant Family Virtual Reality Commission and in 2020  was commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW to produce a major new work to adorn the new Sydney Modern extension while under construction.

Using collage, printmaking, sculpture and video animation, Ross remixes and transforms the visual material produced in the early days of European occupation to  expose truths that she says have been hiding in plain sight.

Landscapes are “invaded” by fluorescent yellow and birds lose their heads as she destabilises the vision of a land tamed and possessed, and of famous portrait subjects who are still lauded for their “discoveries”.

National Portrait Gallery, August 24-February 2. Free.

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