Town Hall Gallery will present The Uncomfortable Truth: Maree Clarke and Megan Evans, a major new exhibition bringing two formidable artists into dialogue to unpack the impact of colonisation in a contemporary context.
Opening on November 4, the exhibition - announced Wednesday - presents more than 50 works, including new commissions, examining colonisation from either side of the frontier and revealing how invasion, dispossession and inherited responsibility continue to shape the present.
Descendants from opposite sides of Australia's colonial history, Clarke, a Mutti Mutti/Yorta Yorta and Boon Wurrung/Wemba Wemba artist and Evans, a fifth-generation settler Australian of Scottish and Irish ancestry, have shared a friendship of more than 25 years, encompassing artistic collaborations and five years working together as co-curators at Wyndham Art Gallery.
Throughout, their practices have developed in parallel, each firmly grounded in a distinct cultural position.
The Uncomfortable Truth brings these trajectories into direct conversation for their first joint presentation. Rather than collapsing their perspectives into one, the exhibition holds their differences in productive exchange, placing Clarke's cultural knowledge, practices of mourning and acts of revival alongside evans' interrogation of settler privilege, inherited violence and commitment to truth-telling, while foregrounding the exchange of knowledge and the responsibilities of working together from distinct positions within colonial history.
"We're incredibly proud to present the first exhibition to bring two formidable Naarm-based artists, Maree Clarke and Megan Evans, into dialogue," said Town Hall Gallery curator Rachel Keir-Smith.
"The works have been carefully positioned in conversation, together illuminating the ongoing impacts of colonisation, the importance of truth-telling and the role of culture, history and intergenerational knowledge in collective healing."
"The exhibition is largely guided by Maree and Megan's lived experiences and family histories, and the ways both artists have used and shared their creativity to navigate pain, loss and injustice."
Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal cultural and artistic practices. For more than three decades, her work has focused on reviving traditions lost or forced into dormancy through invasion and colonisation.
Working across photography, sculpture, video and installation, and with materials ranging from glass and organic matter to 3D printing, the talented artist explores customary ceremony, ancestral knowledge and the continuing effects of dispossession.
Her collaborative and intergenerational approach places the transmission of cultural knowledge to family and community at the centre of her practice.
Among the new works commissioned for The Uncomfortable Truth is a major photographic series by Clarke featuring 16 of her nieces and nephews dressed in Georgian and Victorian clothing.
The series uses the formal language of colonial portraiture to confront the historical structures embodied by these garments, while foregrounding the cultural knowledge and practices that have endured despite them.
Loaned works include Clarke's Made from memory - on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, 2019-20, which draws on her childhood memories of Balranald Mission on Mutti Mutti Country, where she spent her earliest years sleeping in a suitcase beside the river; and Me in Mourning, an installation shaped by the loss of three of her brothers and her subsequent research into traditional mourning practices.
Megan Evans is an interdisciplinary artist whose career began with the creation of large-scale political murals in the 1980s.
Working across video, photography, sculpture and installation, her practice examines the colonial inheritance of contemporary Australia and the ways domestic objects, property and material comfort can carry histories of dispossession and violence. Evans has frequently explored the history of her great-grandmother, Isabella Kelly, née Robertson, and situates herself in the clothes and objects of her ancestors' era, while the life and institutional records of her late husband, Gunditjmara artist and activist Les Griggs, a member of the Stolen Generations, have informed her recent and ongoing work.
Among Evans's new commissions is a series of embroidered christening dresses dating from the turn of the 20th century, across which she has rewritten Dorothea Mackellar's My Country to articulate histories of colonisation.
The delicacy of the white fabric is placed in sharp tension with the violence and dispossession carried by the embroidered text, drawing attention to the radically different inheritances experienced by First Nations and settler children.
"The exhibition is an invitation to reflect on the continuing impacts of colonisation through the powerful work of two significant contemporary artists," said Cr Wes Gault Mayor of Boroondara.
"Town Hall Gallery is honoured to present the first joint exhibition by Maree Clarke and Megan Evans, whose practices bring distinct cultural perspectives into meaningful dialogue."
"Through more than 50 works, including new commissions, 'The Uncomfortable Truth' offers our community an opportunity to engage with truth-telling, cultural knowledge and the responsibilities we share in understanding Australia's colonial history."
The Uncomfortable Truth: Maree Clarke and Megan Evans will be presented at Town Hall Gallery from the 4th of November 2026 to 30 January 2027.
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