Commonwealth and Council presents Jemima Wyman’s A Haze Descends, drawing on the artist’s MAS-archive of global protest images, compiled since 2008. Its name refers to ‘en masse’ (in a group all together) or exceptionally large, vis-a-vis the quantity of matter in a physical body. Wyman zeroes-in on the functional and symbolic attire worn by protestors and activists for protective cover, demonstration, or both. A Haze Descends finds Wyman scouring her catalog for emergent commonalities and serendipities in motifs and their means of deployment, particularly the use of smoke and skulls—cutting down images, isolating similar fragments, and reassembling them in new collective-shapes through her photo collage practice. Wyman treats image as metonym, vehicle and symbol. In the precarious, constantly shifting environment of a public protest, where verbal communication often disappears into noise, the urgency of materials and visual shorthand becomes apparent. Protest wear—masks, costumes, flags—becomes both signal and camouflage, as if to scream more loudly in anonymity, while transforming the protesting body into a metonym for the cause. A skull plays at multiple registers of death: harbinger of doom, witness for the fallen, the pirate’s Jolly Roger, or simply “poison.” Similarly, a plume of smoke whether it is from fireworks, flares, tear gas or burning property used in protest triggers connotations related to warning, distress and alarm. Held together in a diaphanous pall that wafts across territorial and ideological bounds, cloaking all in a haze that both obscures and amplifies. The growing MAS-archive provides Wyman with a lexicon from which to build her own syntaxes, which in turn mirror their component parts. A mass of skulls coalesces into an ossuary in one work Undead Aggregate Icon (1)... while in another, a voluptuous bloom bursts into multicolored splinters of cloud. The title of each work is a sprawling, multi-page record detailing each constituent image and the associated protest, location, and date, gathering disparate historical moments into a partial yet sweeping account of global unrest. Jemima Wyman (b.1977, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Los Angeles and Brisbane) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and BA from Queensland University of Technology. Solo exhibitions have been held at Sullivan and Strumpf, Sydney (2021, 2019, 2017); Commonwealth and Council (2018, 2015); Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2015); and the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2016, 2014). Select group exhibitions have been held at the Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia (2021); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2021); Inman Gallery, Houston (2020); University of Queensland, Brisbane (2020); University of Toronto (2020); Chronus Art Center, Shanghai (2019); La Gaité Lyrique, Paris (2019); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2018); Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul (2017); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017). Wyman is the recipient of an Innovation Grant from the University of Houston (2018), Woman’s Building and Metabolic Studio Fellowship (2017), Australia Council New Work Grant (2016), Arts Queensland Career Development Grant (2011), and QANTAS Foundation Art Award (2010).