Give me fever! Jackie Ryan’s fanciful retro-pop solo show
Jackie Ryan steps away from her Brisbane Writers Festival desk to deliver a rather literary, solo art show – Fever Dream – that’s deliciously peppered with pop culture and Queensland arts identities.
Who knew that as well as being an author and artistic director of Brisbane Writers Festival, Jackie Ryan is an artist?
That’s a surprise to some of us, although not to John Stafford and Jodie Cox of Onespace at South Brisbane.
They have been engaged in sporadic projects with Ryan for a decade or so and recently offered her a solo exhibition at their spanking new gallery, which overlooks the Brisbane River at South Brisbane.
Ryan’s funky art is displayed on aluminium sheets and daubed on an inner wall, which makes sense as her public art is an extrapolation of her comic book work.
When I catch up with Ryan at the gallery she seems almost as surprised as I am by this solo exhibition that is part of the program for Melt, Brisbane Powerhouse’s major city-wide festival of queer art and culture.
“Do many people know that you are an artist?” I ask.
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“I think I’m a very well-kept secret,” she offers. “It’s been very intense working in arts administration the last couple of years so doing this was nice and a reminder that I can do other things. Now I understand the idea of art as therapy.”
Her exhibition is called Fever Dream and encompasses three strands of her oeuvre.
There’s her Burger Force series for starters. Burger Force is an Aurealis and Ledger Award-winning independent comic that features real people and locations that have been “comified” through a laborious combination of software and hand retouching. It is written, directed, designed, photographed, edited, produced, location-scouted, costume-designed “and a bunch of other control-freak stuff” by Ryan. She released the first single comic issue in 2009 and while production is ongoing, Burger Force is already something of a time capsule featuring Brisbane performing talent and architectural gems.
Then there’s the Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary (FFA) project, a fictitious amateur writers’ group starring various oddball characters with certain “ideas” (read: incorrect ideas) about their place in the literary world. Contributing writers can be read online (just Google it) and they pose for deliberately awkward author photos and cover shots in costumes befitting their eccentric creations.
Ryan has an abiding interest in culture that connects her work across form and genres, from writing to performance, film and visual design. In the series Full Circle she has remixed images from a multitude of her projects (including Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary and Burger Force) into intriguing scenarios with pop culture influences, including artist Roy Lichtenstein.
Her partner and muse Carody Culver, editor of Griffith Review, has written some didactic panel lines about the show. She writes that “this show features everything you’d expect to find on the Jackie Ryan arts bingo card: retro aesthetics? CHECK. Hot people? CHECK. Elite posing? CHECK. Spies? CHECK. Incredible fits? CHECK. Using an array of photo-editing techniques, Jackie has transformed her stunning shots of local legends into otherworldly scenes that evoke the singular aesthetics of pop-culture touchstones like Dynasty, Get Smart and Golden Age comics. These digital images are then dye-sublimated on aluminium sheets, bringing the works into a new realm of materiality.
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“Open your eyes and embrace this incredible showcase of new work from the woman who brought you the iconic Burger Force graphic novel series and the unhinged world of the Fanciful Fiction Auxiliary, and who literally wrote the book on the real-life kaleidoscopic extravaganza that was World Expo 88. (Ryan is the author of the award-winning book We’ll Show the World : Expo 88).”
Her colleague Myles McGuire (a writer who is also programs director at Brisbane Writers Festival) has written an entertaining catalogue essay and he asks “… is she a polymath? A Renaissance woman? Or are these merely cover stories, false identities worn and discarded? The defining features of Ryan’s ouevre is her affinity for masks and artifice, simultaneously camp and chic.”
Her work is littered with pop cultural references and feature many well-knows arts figures. The hero work is Old Gods and New (Featuring Fez Fa’anana). It is one of a number of works that could be deemed cinematic.
My favourite features a Roman soldier looking pensive against a backdrop of a castle and what looks like crusaders in battle. It’s called How Often Do You Think About The Roman Empire? (Featuring Mark Winmill) and is a clever riff on a popular social media phenomenon. What surprised everyone is how often people – blokes mainly – think about the Roman Empire. For the record, I do, up to four times a week, but apparently some think about it several times a day. Not so much women. Go figure.
Ryan lists all sorts of pop cultural influences including The Avengers (the ’60s TV version starring Diana Rigg as Emma Peel) and retro TV shows such as Get Smart, which she has referenced in her work, including Burger Force.
Showing alongside Ryan in the smaller Lounge Gallery at Onespace is Easton Dunne with their installation work Hail Holy Queen (2023), which applies a queer lens to a childhood time and place where, according to the artist, they “held an acute sense of [their] own queerness and transness but had no language or agency to recognise or express this identity, in part as a result of the conservative influence of religious beliefs on family and community”.
The installation recreates aspects of Dunne’s paternal grandparents’ house, on a cattle property on Ghungalu Country. It was a location for many family gatherings, often after Sunday church services, in which the artist and their family would say the rosary together before watching television and sharing meals. Easton will also be concurrently exhibiting work at Brisbane Powerhouse as part of Melt.
Jackie Ryan: Fever Dream and Easton Dunne: Hail Holy Queen continue until November 16 at Onespace (open Wednesday to Saturday), South Brisbane.
onespace.com.au