Proximity and Perception focuses on a major new work by Danie Mellor commissioned by the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, and places it within the context of his recent art practice and ongoing engagement with his matrilineal Country of the North Queensland rainforest region, south of Cairns.

Danie Mellor is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. His works are represented in major Australian and international gallery and museum collections. Mellor has won numerous awards for his artworks that reimagine complex histories and explore the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian cultures, which have earned him “an important place in the visual narrative of Australian history.” (The Australian, January 2010)

Proximity and Perception spans the last decade of Mellor’s artistic practice and brings together highly detailed drawings rendered in Mellor’s signature blue pastel, alongside recent photographic works.

Mellor uses a rage of perspectives to make sense of and record the changing landscape of his ancestors while highlighting his ongoing engagement with notions of distance, dominance, gaze, representation, dissemination, presence and perception.

Proximity is a concept that resonates deeply with Mellor. As an artist, it calls up notions of closeness or distance, a relationship with space, of being away from or close to a place that holds a special interest or cultural connection, articulating tensions and connectivity between peoples and environs.