Dean Colls

Dean Colls’ work asks viewers to reconsider their perception of the world and the privilege placed on the human perspective. Rex Australis: The King is dead, long live the King explores the concept of changing fortunes and the transience of existence, born from Colls’ personal, childhood memories of travelling in rural Australia. Based on a computer design, the merino ram’s skull comprises 60,000 triangular facets of COR-TEN steel, designed for exposure to the elements, welded together. Colls stresses the decline of the sheep industry, a once prosperous industry for Australia’s economy, and the detrimental rise of the mining industry. It is a memorial to passing grandeur and simultaneously a symbol of hope: that life can arise out of the death of the new king of our economy. Colls finds beauty in skeletal forms that bring together symbols of death with the frameworks of life, exposing the unsustainability and inevitable decay of Australia’s rural industries.

Rex Australis was located at the Skye Road exit ramp on outer-Melbourne’s Peninsula Link Freeway between 2013 and 2017.