eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness

11 EX DE MEDICI: BEAUTIFUL WICKEDNESS System (This is the Place Where the Martyrs Grow) (detail) 2022 Chris Saines, CNZM Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foreword ‘Oh, what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?’, screeches the Wicked Witch of the West in Victor Fleming’s 1939 screen classic The Wizard of Oz . They are the last words the villain utters before she melts, having been inadvertently doused in water by the film’s innocent protagonist Dorothy, who is trying to extinguish a fire the witch has lit. The movie is a psychoanalytic response to L Frank Baum's allegorical novel, which alludes to unscrupulous industrial magnates — so-called robber barons —who preyed on human and natural resources across the United States’ drought-ravaged Midwest at the dawn of the twentieth century. As John Steinbeck wrote in the opening of his contemporaneous masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1939): ‘The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore', as the banks and the industrial-scale ranchers proceeded to devastate the livelihoods of the small landholders in their path. Subversive, countercultural and brilliantly surreal, The Wizard of Oz metaphorically sets up many of the targets eX de Medici trains her sights on. An avowed environmentalist and activist, the artist is dedicated to uncloaking abuses of power and revealing their effects on ordinary and everyday lives, highlighting the excesses of global capitalism, and disclosing the economic imperatives that drive public policymaking. She has steadily and defiantly followed a yellow brick road of ‘wicked’ beauty, seducing viewers with enthralling detail to expose the opaque underbelly of consumerism and the insidious reach of systems of surveillance, authority and state-sanctioned control. The largest exhibition of her 40-year career, ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ takes us into the exquisitely dark heart of de Medici’s abiding concerns: the value and fragility of life, global affairs, greed and commerce, and the enmeshed, universal themes of conflict and death. Crossing over different artistic paths, she has been resolute in her critique of inequitable and unethical social and political systems. Responding to the labyrinthine manoeuvres of world politics and the destructive influences of state and corporate power, de Medici conceals surreptitious yet razor-sharp barbs among lush arrangements of historical and contemporary emblems of excess. The recurring motifs of the moth and the gun represent two parallel figurative ecologies: nature with its evolutionary imperative to survive versus the self-destructive impulses of humans whose technologies are rapidly destroying them and the planet. In de Medici’s own terms, ‘I have in my work, tried to examine the pernicious forces at work within the human hegemony — the fetishistic allure of power over the macro and the micro, the human and the non-human’. 1 In this regard, paintings like The Theory of Everything 2005 seem indexical to her assault on the relentless march of cultural consumerism and, paradoxically, on the creation of natural wastelands in its wake.