Joseph Christie Evans: Monerlisa

Friday 11 December 2025 – Saturday 10 January 2026

Joseph Christie Evans’ Monerlisa (2025) is a new wall-based installation consisting of several large panels of tiled A4 sheets of paper, printed and provisionally assembled directly onto the gallery walls. When viewed en masse, these spatially collaged pages aggregate and cohere into a social and situational narrative of appropriated imagery.

Much like his choice of medium, standard printer paper, the images Christie Evans has employed are themselves readymade, pulled from various sources and reproduced around the space at near life-size scale. The images on display are varied but consistent in their representation of people performing various actions, all of whom have been deep-etched and cleaved from their original context. What may have once been street-front advertisements selling denim, sports apparel or piano lessons are now stripped of their commercial narratives. The people that once existed in these scenes are given an opportunity to exist as isolated ‘subjects’, from a pensive boy holding a football, to a snowboarder carving through the room. While producing a shared narrative, it is undeniable that these ‘characters’ or ‘actors’ index an external context while being devoid of one. Repopulated around the room, they are playful and disobedient in equal measure.

Anchoring the installation and providing its namesake is a floor-to-ceiling reproduction of the wall on which Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. In the wake of the recent Louvre heist, there is a renewed irony in the appropriation of imagery from this particular museum, as if a slightly delirious Ocean’s 11 was about to take place. This scene, atomised across sheets of office paper and positioned alongside these archetypal characters, highlights an openness to playful appropriation and the recontextualising of imagery in what the artist describes as relational ‘group portraiture’. This description could also be expanded to audience members in the space, as they circulate amongst these flattened characters of comparable scale and scenes that almost feel enterable.

– Ashton Biddulph

Schmick Contemporary acknowledges the Gadigal
People of the Eora Nation upon whose unceded lands we live and work.
We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

schmick contemporary