Kansas Smeaton: I Am You and You Are Me

COMA is pleased to present Kansas Smeaton’s solo presentation titled ‘I Am You and You Are Me’, on view Friday 20 June - 19 July, at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, Sydney, 2204, NSW.

This comprehensive new body of work draws from ancient mythology and nocturnal symbolism, recasting Artemis as a vessel for exploring identity, performance and power. Smeaton’s figures are cast between the shadows of night and day, set against theatrical backdrops of dense forests, they meander into the allure of the unknown and untamed self.

Often portrayed striding freely through the forest with bow in hand, Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness, and the moon, represents the unruly, untethered female, a figure of independence, intuition and instinct. Bird on the wire, pulls inspiration from this character of Artemis, her gaze is unrelenting, her posture strong, her dress pulled up above her knees as if she is about to run off on a hunt through the forest. For Smeaton, this mythological archetype becomes a vehicle to explore deeper psychological and societal tensions around femininity, freedom, and the structures that seek to contain them. 

Drawing from Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes - universal prototypes for ideas and behaviours rooted in the collective unconscious, Smeaton identifies Artemis, and by extension all mythological characters as a manifestation of what Jung termed the ‘Self’, the totality of the psyche, and also ‘The Shadow’, the repressed and hidden traits we push down to maintain our ‘Persona, ’the mask we present to the world.

In the painting Persona, a singular figure is repeated three times – perched on a bed of linen, one figure looks longing at their own reflection that appears in a mirror held up by themselves. Here, Kansas offers a literal representation of Jung’s archetypes, the self, the shadow and the persona, a tight ribbon wrapped around their leg subtly suggesting a tension between inner instinct and outer expectation, referencing the uniting of opposites, through a third entity merging to create one’s true self.

Symbolism permeates every element of the show. Nocturnal references abound: the moon, the shadows, the cool light that bathes everything in ambiguity. These lunar cues gesture not only to Artemis’s dominion over night but also to the subconscious, the emotional underworld where so much of our psychic life unfolds. The small trio of moths that flutter throughout the smaller paintings, The same worms that and Someday eat you too, act as spectral companions to Artemis, goddess of the moon. Their delicate presence suggests vulnerability, transformation, and an instinctual longing for something luminous and unknowable. The works oscillate between clarity and obscurity, containment and chaos, suggestion and eruption. The deep saturated blues, bruised purples and deep greens, that are constant throughout this presentation, mirror a place between day and night, a threshold between now and then: a place of mystery, beauty, and instinct.