Artist Tom Polo is engaged in the art of social exchange. His work looks to interrogate the ideas of conversation, gesture, and performativity throughout our society, questioning how we see the world, and why we interact with it. There is a layer of fun to his pieces, a jovial hint of postmodernity which brushes lightly from work to work.
Primarily, he works as an abstract painter, creating large staged scenes with vivid colours. These works often contain a piercing clarity, his figures watching the audience, just as they watch his work.
His most recent exhibition, In a part of your mind, I am you showcases the depths of his work, stretching across painting, but also into sculpture, video, and text-based practices to provoke and challenge audiences.
Polo sees his art as a dialogue between himself and his audiences, a story that is bigger than any one piece. It is an act of theatre, a journey to be recounted and shared with those who see his art. As such, the exhibition has been curated around theatrical ideals, with each of the five sections following the five key chapters of Italian theatre: the opening, the rising, the climax, the fall, and the resolution. This structure gives format to his work, and allows the distinctions, both in practice and in meaning, to blossom.
In a part of your mind, I am you is being shown at Ngununggula, one of NSW’s more recent and exciting regional art galleries. Originally the dairy building to Retford House (now a national trust site), the gallery opened in October 2021 to great acclaim. The colonial heritage of the site means that the traditional gallery ‘white cube’ is impossible to achieve, with beamed walls, corrugated iron ceilings, and the occasional roped off staircase impossible to cover up. Instead, lighting rigs are clearly suspended in every stage, whilst each ‘chapter’ of Polo’s story is assigned its own highlight wall colour and swathe of carpet. In doing In a part of your mind, I am you, it transforms the gallery into a theatre, a stage where audiences perform the act of looking, unable to hide from view.
Polo’s ideas of time and performativity are all brought to their climax in the fifth chapter, ‘The still-now the after and the always’. As this last room opens up, audiences are greeted with the stares of a dozen abstract paintings, gazing at the doorway as they rest on the backs of empty chairs. A row of rainbow mirrors and newspaper line the near wall, reflecting the single, wall-sized abstract painting on the far which the chairs themselves are positioned to face.
In this room everything crystallises; the voyeuristic watcher and the constructed actor collide again and again across the space. Here, we watch an invisible audience seated in their chairs as they, in turn, look at the abstract work on the far wall. We become voyeurs, peering in through the playhouse window, watching the watchers. Yet, at the same time, the paintings hanging off the chairs stare back. Just as we watch, so too are we watched. Even when we stop looking at the chairs, they are still looking at us. This audience watch us viewing the wall-sized piece, just as we watched them. Finally, this whole scene is reflected back into the space over and over by the mirrors, multiplying and tangling perception and subject into a gordian knot. Polo pushes the ideas of perception and engagement to its endpoint, an endless number of ways to see, an infinite number of ways to be seen.
The exhibition features the inclusion of work by international artists, including Tracey Emin and Urs Fisher, loaned from the Art Gallery of NSW. These look to stimulate new dialectics between works, and further the ideas contained within Polo’s pieces. Emin’s work, a piece of neon text, was particularly appropriate to the exhibition. Appropriating window front sign aesthetics, not only does it provide a post-modern commentary on consumerism and the idea of a window façade, but, through its inclusion in the show, it becomes appropriated by Polo in turn. Creating a dialogue through the connections to his own text-based works, Polo appropriates the idea of the window façade to create new connections between his works in turn, conjuring a postmodern conversation between his text work, his painting, and the global art space as a whole.
Take your time walking back through the exhibition after this last room. Like the end of all great theatre, it does not simply stop, but rather, loops back, reflecting on all that has come before it. Though none of the work in the previous rooms are new, the way they interact changes after the closing of this narrative. Hidden connections are unlocked, new dialogues discovered.
One of the great successes of this show is the ability to breathe new meaning into work that we had previously encountered. A good story has the potential to be read and read again, allowing new insights to be found, and hidden details to be uncovered. In a part of your mind, I am you is similar. Works have covert conversations that are easy to miss at first glance, secret dialogues happen between chapters, only unraveled at a second viewing. Upon leaving the exhibition, it’s hard not to take up the narrative again, to go through one more time, caught in a loop that you don’t want to leave.
In a part of your mind, I am you exhibited at Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery from 28th June to 24th August 2025.
