Retreat
- Dale Cox

Many powerful people and Corporations would see us continue on this unsustainable, bleak path.  

Are we not all deeply invested in our future? My artistic enquiry will always reflect this fact. I will not look away, nor will my art offer a distraction from the existential dilemma we face. 

In the two and a half years since my last solo exhibition Supermankind, global weather is increasingly supercharged by climate change. One of the more positive changes however is a shift in Australian public sentiment that climate change is by far our greatest existential threat and challenge, ultimately reflected in a change of Federal Government.  

Now that the ‘Climate Wars’ – an embarrassingly Australian phenomenon – are surely over, I’ve begun to explore broader themes again, and to grapple with the too many to mention historical narratives and mechanisms that have lead us to where we stand today. Coupled with our reckoning of the reality of accelerating environmental decline, there seems to be a more urgent willingness to examine and critique the grand narratives of Colonialism, Industrialisation, the Patriarchy and what we ominously refer to as ‘end game’ Capitalism. 

It’s almost as if we are all waking up at once, to a house on fire. And whilst the challenges and magnitude of the situation we find ourselves in is dire indeed, at least a kind of reckoning, not just by an elite group of thinkers, but within the collective imagination of broader Australia, seems underway. 

No wonder we’re all so tired!

So why have I named the exhibition Retreat? The new paintings might be read as both an examination of the ways in which (privileged) people might find retreat- such as in the Package Tour aluminium can works and with I got mine. However the word also applies to the retreat of nature such as in Terminal Incline.

Also incorporated into this show is the large diptych, commissioned by the Costa Group in Geelong. This re-imagines a vast ‘Tract’ of the Corio Bay, Corangamite, Geelong region during the early stages of European Colonisation c1860-70. The pastoral history of Geelong is portrayed along with a once thriving viticulture industry snaking along the Barwon river.  The rich geology of the region is also captured in the exposed strata showing two complete sea inundations over hundreds of million years.’

– Dale Cox 2020-2022.