One of those exhibitions that was pretty much a 'must see' from the time I heard about it; finally got round to it last weekend with Kim and enjoyed it heaps. It struck me as an exhibition in which a few of the individual pieces were real keys to the whole - the 'upside-down Alice' was one, and the last one (as numbered by the curators), showing a world inside and expanding out from Alice's mind, and a couple of others which I can't remember now - and this might particularly have been the case given that Blackman's rendition of Alice is characterised by a strong focus on a few recurring motifs, the white rabbit and the tea party (and, more idiosyncratically, flowers and doors and passages) in particular. It's rare for one of the paintings to be composed in such a way that Alice herself is unequivocally the subject of the piece, and the series as a whole is suffused with a sense of disorder which emphasises the perspectival nature of its representation (ambiguity intended).
Didn't strike me as especially Australian, but it's far removed from the classic, utterly (almost fetishistically) English manner of depicting and imagining Alice and her adventures - and the surrealism of the style and concomitant highlighting of the workings of the unconscious goes hand in hand with that... (Is there such a thing as an 'Australian unconscious'? I don't know, but I imagine books have probably been written on the subject.) I did like the colours, which may've been the most recognisably 'Australia' aspect - ochres and sea blues and et cetera - and also the way that Alice's colours changed from painting to painting. Well, I liked it all, really.
