Calypso

“A cloying cocktail, a Coolangatta motor inn, the sweetest mangoes, syncopated steel drums piped out across a pool deck,” says Eora/Sydney-based contemporary artist Gerwyn Davies, setting a languorous scene as he lists the namesakes of his upcoming series, Calypso, which arrives at Michael Reid Sydney in May and can now be previewed by request. “The term is used to name a variety of things, each summoning the swelter and sweat of Summer.”

Fashioning wild costumes with found objects and fabulously gaudy materials, Davies works at the nexus of performance, photo media and soft sculptural assemblage to construct personae poised between real and ersatz. These adventures in magnificent excess upend our expectations of a photo portrait – that it must reveal some essential truth about its subject. Instead, the self is slippery and unstable: a conga line of pop-cultural archetypes, visual puns, queer iconography and contorted, abstracted figures set against uncanny, sun-kissed spaces brought to life with hyperbolic, cinematic style.

In Calypso, these elements conjure a world of Australian tropical kitsch – one not too far removed from the parochial torpor of Porpoise Spit, albeit queered and reimagined with warm nostalgia and knowing camp.

For previews and first access to works from Calypso by Gerwyn Davies, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au