Sideshow Alley

Featuring a sometimes disquieting selection of portraits, Sideshow Alley combines history, biography and the art of portraiture with true crime, scandal and sensation. National Portrait Gallery Curator Joanna Gilmour introduces the relationship between death and portraiture via a focus on the various ways in which artists, photographers and entrepreneurs made use of portraits of Australian convicts and criminals: the canny or unscrupulous publishers trading in salacious prints and penny dreadfuls; the otherwise respectable people who put cartes de visite of serial killers into their family albums; the photographic studios doing a brisk trade in portraits of heroes and villains; and the waxworks proprietors who, with their 'Chambers of Horrors', turned violence, misfortune and the macabre into a lucrative art form.

Combined with beautifully illustrated prints, drawings and photographs from the collections of major Australian public libraries, archives and galleries as well as from those of the Old Melbourne Gaol, the Victoria Police Museum, and the Justice & Police Museum, Sydney, Sideshow Alley discusses death masks and wax anatomical models amidst a surprising variety of objects, and draws an intriguing portrait of Australian society and culture during the nineteenth century.

About the Author

Joanna Gilmour is the Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. Among her previous exhibitions and publications for the Gallery are Husbands & Wives (2010); Indecent exposure: Annette Kellerman (2011); and Elegance in exile: portrait drawings from colonial Australia (2012); and she has twice been the co-ordinating curator of the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2012 and 2013). She oversees the twice-yearly changeovers to the Gallery’s permanent Collection Displays, and has consequently become a bit of boffin where Australian history is concerned.

Explorers, bushrangers, strumpets, mutineers, and cannibal convicts are among the topics she’s explored in floortalks and in her writing for Portrait magazine; while her fascination with the Burke and Wills story led to an interest in the prevalence of bushy beards in portraits of chaps from the 1850s and 1860s, resulting in the 2011 online exhibition Jo’s Mo Show (with beards). Her current projects include The Wax Museum – an exhibition on the subject of death masks, posthumous portraits and other evidence of late nineteenth century Australia’s taste for the fiendish and ghoulish – which will open in December 2015.