By Calista Crawford
Jemima Wyman’s Deep Surface is currently showing at QUT Art Museum as the venues’ first exhibition after a 13-month forced closure following severe storm damage and funding setbacks.
The art museum, located on the basement floor of Gardens Points’ U Block, suffered significant flood damage in December of 2024 and has since been the subject of major repairs.
Jemima Wyman is a Palawa woman and QUT alumni who is currently based Los Angeles, with her exhibition Deep Surface serving as a promising trailblazer for QUT Art Museum.
Curated by QUT Galleries and Museums’ Katherine Dionysius, Deep Surface is a retrospective celebration of works created by Wyman across the entirety of her career to-date.
This year marks 30 years since Jemima Wyman commenced her studies with as a QUT student studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the mid-1990s, where she developed a unique appreciation for patterns and versatile experiences of pattern-perception.
Featuring a complex array of multi-medium pieces including intricate photography collages, ominous video sequences, and an elusive curtain light feature, Deep Surface promises to captivate its audience with strong messaging on the power of masked activism in the wake of civil unrest. Wyman’s work demonstrates to viewers the hidden ability of camouflage to enable a new way of knowing – a tool for silently bearing witness, specifically relevant to practices of protest and activism.
Deep Surface includes pieces from Wyman’s Distress Patterns and Forewarnings which present themes of collective identity and shared consciousness as they are experienced through protesters who choose to embellish themselves with recognisable, blaring motifs.
In Aggregate icon (Rosetta RBW), part of Wyman’s Aggregate icon series, found photographs are collated into intricately composed collages in the form of large, circular shapes that demonstrate the psychological effect of collective organising.
With each individual protestor disappearing into the tapestry of a united group, the outcome emerges as a mesmerising front with unflinching combined strength.
Jemima Wyman’s Deep Surface invites QUT students, staff, alumni, and each unknowing passer-by to become the centre of an immersive, captivating experience which carries them through a world of masks and shadows, promising to leave them breathless and bewildered.
