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A lot of people said they saw the wickedness of the devil’s face when she smiled, although none had the courage to tell her to her face. Old Mona Lisa would have looked sour as a lemon beside Angel Day on the rare days she put a smile on her dial, laughing with her friends when some new man was in town.1
Like Angel Day and the other Desperence residents in Alexis Wright’s recent novel Carpentaria, Destiny Deacon’s work is populated by characters who are high-key in colour, larger than life, yet intensely distilled from it. Deacon’s world is also deeply, sharply disturbing in its description of the relations between black and white Australia. Lurking stereotypes meet histories tucked close under the skin, these menacing eddies and currents haunt her works as they unfold, weaving together the humourous and the tragic, laughter and tears.
Last laughs 1995/2004 is an example of the ambiguous challenge offered by Destiny Deacon’s practice: tough, complex and paradoxical, exposing oft-unspoken fault-lines within polite society, the ‘avant-garde’ and the art-world. In this work we are offered an image of Deacon’s sister and two close friends caught in a moment of play and parody. One woman cradles a ‘black’ doll, dressed in the colours of the Aboriginal flag, suggesting ‘the indigenous’ as key. Dolls, friends, family and her own domestic realm have always been amongst the central subjects of Deacon’s work. In this image the doll operates as an emblem of the artist’s broader interests in the representation of both the feminine and the indigenous. In front of this peeling, rust-red corrugated iron backdrop these women appear raucous, vivacious, and potentially dangerous. Last laughs... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline