GREGORY UZELAC:

ALIEN NATION

21 October - 1 November 2023

DARLINGS, in association with Puzzle Gallery, is pleased to show Alien Nation, a presentation of new works by Sydney-based American artist Gregory Uzelac. With this exhibition, Uzelac directs his multimedia, mythic practice toward migration narratives, exploring themes of assimilation, isolation, belonging, and the sacrifices that come with new beginnings.

The exhibition presents a subnarrative of Uzelac’s ongoing Song of @Merica, a saga that chronicles the glorious rise of Merica, the land of liberty, and its fall at the hands of King Vir.us, a technopathogenic harbinger of the consumption of all things. The “artifacts” in the exhibition come from the Wydeshis, otherworldly immigrants who leave their dying homeworld for Merica. The exhibition chronicles the myriad of experiences faced by the Wydeshis, experiences not dissimilar to the patterns of migration — of all kinds, including forced and coerced transport — that shape the liberal mythologies and xenophobic fantasies of developed nations and are ongoing in our contemporary reality.

The word “Wydesh” (外aıдエш) is a linguistic hybrid that encapsulates the simultaneous bigotry and intra-camaraderie of people who are deemed “alien” and other. Many linguistic, cultural, and liturgical allusions swim together with adapted migrant testimonies in this esoteric narrative. Presented as if in a time capsule, viewers are beckoned to converse “face to face” with the experiences often lost in the chasms of national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. The artifacts within are made entirely out of the artist’s immigration documents and other paperwork accumulated over the nearly four years since moving to Australia.

Each artefact in Alien Nation serves as a piece of a narrative puzzle that Uzelac himself is trying to solve. The legend of the Wydeshis is imbued with all of the difficult feelings of national, cultural, religious, and communal limbo that Uzelac has felt, first as a child of immigrants, then as an immigration law assistant, and now as an immigrant himself. In this way, the aliens’ namesake takes on a more homonymic, esoteric meaning: Why? Why do we leave? Why do we stay? Why do we so easily demarcate between here and there, us vs. them? Uzelac has imbued each piece in this exhibition with these questions, which connect us, on a primordial level, with anyone who has ever been a stranger in a strange land.

@greguzelac #wydesh