Jemima Wyman

Commonwealth and Council presents Shimmering Menace, an exhibition of new work by Jemima Wyman. Since 2008, Wyman has built an extensive personal image archive documenting recurrent visual tactics in global protest movements. The patterned collages, textiles, and prints constructed from this index function as records—not necessarily of the protests themselves, but of a continually evolving and adapting aesthetic culture of dissent, articulated through riotous colors, language, camouflage, and obfuscation. Shimmering Menace gathers vernacular protest practices that transform the body into a dynamic communicative surface for collective agitation.

The Distress Patterns series of hand-painted photographs catalogues the symbolic and functional capacities of body paint and painterly motifs used by protesters. In each image, Wyman identifies a particular protest trope such as a cross, a heart, or a bullseye and repeats it across the image’s surface to create a pattern. While the original sign is lost amidst a field of lookalikes, Wyman’s interventions amplify the message’s urgency by pushing its symbolic vehicle to the fore. The wallpaper-like installation transforms individual instances into a tendency, aggregating visual data into a vibrant array that both adorns and communicates.

Inflatables collages various costumes worn by protestors into a rainbow-hued mass. Upon closer inspection, familiar forms and faces emerge from the dense assemblage: cartoon frogs, Pikachu, the American eagle, caricatures of Donald Trump. Here, the body is both exaggerated and effaced: the larger-than-life suit shelters the protestor’s particular body within both a physical and symbolic edifice, a body mask. As the militarization of police forces and innovations in surveillance technologies rapidly advance, protestors must devise ways to circumvent these threats. The playful, full-body shelter of an inflatable suit offers the anonymity of an encrypted message while retaining the urgent physicality of nonviolent presence.

The exhibition’s third body of work compiles the discrete motifs from the Distress Patterns images into kaleidoscopic, patterned textiles. Wyman describes these textiles as "propositional garments”: objects that offer both visual pleasure and tactical function. Topped with the stuffed heads of defaced monuments, the wearable artworks signal both urgency and threat. At the same time, the intricate plays of color and form between motifs construct a sympathetic throughline among political movements, connecting individual wearers to the greater cause through the communicative and movable substrate of the body. The garments reconcile inner and outer, covering and illustrating; they can be taken off, given away or lent, following the shape of the body but existing outside of it.

Shimmering Menace operates at the encounter between body and symbol. Critic and theorist Terry Eagleton writes that "aesthetics begins as a discourse of the body,” referring to the word’s etymology: the experience of perception through the senses. Wyman recuperates this embodied valence of aesthetics with her insistence on the urgency of function and her attention to the political implementations and implications of pattern. In surveying, analyzing and creatively engaging the aesthetic and functional toolbox of protest, Wyman’s work re-sensitizes us to collective practices of dissent that move toward a common goal of liberation

–Audrey Min

Special thanks to Lindsey Richards and James Naish.

Jemima Wyman (b. 1977, Sydney; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2007) and a BA from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (2001). Selected solo exhibitions include UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2027); Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide (2026); Queensland University of Technology (2026); Art Space Mackay (2024, 2016); Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2015); Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015); and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009, 2008). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2026); Carriageworks, Sydney (2026); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2025); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto (2020); Chronus Art Center, Shanghai (2019); La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (2019); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2018); Shepparton Art Museum (2017); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017); and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2015). Wyman is the recipient of Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, Victoria (2025); City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project Grant (2025); New Work Development Grant, Creative Australia (2023); and Cultural Trailblazers, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles (2022).

Wyman's work is in the collections of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Ararat Gallery TAMA, Victoria; Art Bank, Sydney; Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria; Artspace Mackay, Queensland; Museum of Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Newcastle Art Gallery; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Wangaratta Art Gallery, Victoria; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.