Yesterday, I opened my friend Jacky Redgate’s exhibition Hypnagogia with Mirrors at Wollongong Art Gallery. Curated by the artist, this idiosyncratic show brings together old works, new works, and archival materials, all in conversation with each other and with the shape and history of the building. It’s on until 26 November 2023. This is what I said:

There’s a great moment in the film Casablanca. Fate has brought Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) together again. Ilsa asks Rick if he recalls the last time they were together, as lovers, that day the German tanks rolled into Paris. ‘I remember every detail’, Rick says. ‘The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.’ 

I love that line. It says so much about how we all experience the world, combining big world-historical events, which matter to everyone, with small events, which matter just to us and ours. In our own psychic world, mass invasion by fascists can be eclipsed by the hue of a lover’s frock. These things define us.

That scene in Casablanca came back to me when I was talking to Jacky Redgate during the development of this show, we’re opening today. 

But first, let me backtrack …

When I first saw Jacky’s work, in the 1980s, I was drawn by its seriousness. Her stunning photographic series Photographer Unknown, Naar Het Schilder-Boeck, and Work-to-Rule seemed cool, conceptual, and calculated, elegant and erudite. They didn’t seem autobiographical or personal. They seemed to speak to a wider-world concerns, to histories, to theories, to ideas. I was seduced by their smarts. In 1991, I organised an exhibition of her work for New Zealand, which emphasised this understanding. 

But, years later, I became aware of another side of her practice, insistently biographical and personal, focused on childhood memories, even touching on a childhood trauma. When she was three, Jacky took a turn and was hospitalised. Her mother recorded her delirious utterances in a diary. These comments became the subject of a series of surreal photographic tableaux. This series looked back to early Jacky works with psychosexual overtones—her 1970s juvenilia—that one might otherwise have assumed she had transcended.

In 2008, I made another show with Jacky at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Visions from Her Bed included some of the personal stuff, including a creepy early photo of Jacky curled up in a baby’s cot wearing a pig’s-head mask and shiny leggings. The show raised the question of how this personal dimension might have informed Jacky’s later, largely impersonal work. Its title prompted us to imagine all her work as if viewed from the hospital bed of her childhood convalescence.

In 2020, adult and baby Jackys collided spectacularly in Hold On, a photographic series made for Geelong Art Gallery. Jacky’s serious, high modernist abstractions were rudely overrun with dolls and teddy bears, playing doctors and nurses, among other things. Were these new-naughty, kitschy-kiddy works calculated to offend those who loved—and had invested in—adult Jacky? (I think of Guston disappointing his fans, when he unveiled his comic figurative paintings at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970.)

In Hypnagogia with Mirrors, Jacky has curated herself. The show includes familiar work, previously unseen work, and new work. Her childhood story is referenced in works, but also in archives. The show encompasses Jacky’s life and work, adult and baby, the impersonal and the personal, systems and symptoms—all talking to or past one another, asking us to make sense of them.

Jacky has organised these aspects of her work and life—in all their contradiction—into the symmetrical crown structure of the Wollongong Art Gallery. Things on either side mirror one another, as if pointing to similarities and differences. 

To me, it seems, her curatorial process was as much about how to pack a mental suitcase as how to tell a story. It’s as if Jacky is inviting us to rummage through the hemispheres of her brain, where the contents and where they are filed might both be important. Hypnagogia with Mirrors seems to be full of coincidences, juxtapositions, and eureka moments. But is it significance or serendipity? Your call.

The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.

[IMAGE: Jacky Redgate Wedding Wishes 1977]
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