Joseph McGlennon | The Hunt

Joseph McGlennon’s forthcoming solo exhibition The Hunt will be presented alongside a survey of the artist’s past work throughout Olsen Gallery, Sydney.

The Hunt extends the artist’s practice of beautifully composed photographic images evoking colonial perceptions of the Australian landscape into a series that more directly engages with the violence of this history that they both represent and participate in. While McGlennon’s past work has possessed the seething weight of this violence, through gloomy scenes of extinct animals depicted through the kind of highly contrived realism that one finds in natural history museum exhibits, The Hunt brings this violence to the surface with a series of works depicting hunting dogs that were specially bred and trained to kill kangaroos throughout the nineteenth century.

This series could be interpreted as works imagining scenes from a massacre, and yet they resist any simple political reading through the artist’s dedication to his aesthetic concerns. The colonial dimensions are made emphatic through the choice of colour palette, and a painterly style that is unambiguously drawn from early Australian representations of landscape, flora, and fauna, that reference the European landscape tradition. There is no distinction between the perception of this tradition and the clearly loving treatment of the landscape by McGlennon himself.

McGlennon speaks of this relationship as the layering of complexity, “These works explore the relationship between landscape and history, capturing both their visual allure and the deeper narratives embedded within them. While they reflect an appreciation for the natural environment, they also acknowledge the layered histories that have shaped these places.” The Hunt presents these contradictions without apology, but also without alibi. McGlennon forcefully depicts this violence, superimposed upon the aesthetic expression of our earliest colonial impulses of admiration (I would say love) for the land but at the same time he refuses to exempt himself, or the viewer, from this established perspective.

The result is a melancholic ambivalence, in which the viewer recognises the beauty and grandeur of the Australian landscape. The animals are objects of admiration, heroic like figures of the victorious at war, poised at the moment of their glory. At the same time as these images celebrate the beauty of the Australian landscape, they are trapped painfully in the memory of the fierce violence on which our vision of Australia has been founded. This uncertainty is echoed in the contradiction between the highly realistic, beautifully composed images of animals in states of action and the static atmosphere of unabashed artifice, of an almost clinical sense of composition, combining both the sense of a masterful painting and an illustration from a chauvinistic history.

These elements compete as much as combine, so that there is no picking us from them. There is no viewing the landscape without the memory of the crimes committed upon it and the dogs and native fauna represent a sense of regret or shame in the visage of that in which we take pride. At a moment in our culture when art has predominantly lost its ability to convey the complexity of the world outside of concepts, the ambivalence of the world prior to the application of language, it is gratifying to see an artist say something that does not take a side, nor make an accusation from a position of innocence, but to hold the contradictions in which we live within a single image, asking us only to watch, and to feel the contradictions struggle and writhe.

Exhibition
Joseph McGlennon: The Hunt
2 – 26 April 2025
Olsen Gallery, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Courtesy of the artist and Olsen Gallery, Sydney.