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Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre is proud to present Hardbodies, another dynamic chapter in Hazelhurst's ongoing garden billboard project. Curated by Sydney-based artist Shane Haseman, Hardbodies explores the billboard's objectification of human desire, and its subsequent realisation of a twilight realm between dream and nightmare.
Being perhaps the most ubiquitous structure in the urban environment, the billboard has an inescapable presence, a given of the contemporary landscape; the grand scale and prevalence of which provides the backdrop for the totality of social life that takes place beneath it. The billboard is a complex site of human desire and pleasure, displaced into the theatrical 'screen' of consumption and its fetishism. It's a form of monological discourse intimately connected to a political economy that has receded into images and that trades on the irreducible logic of simulation. Conversely, the billboard is also a deeply ambivalent and conflicting site where dream and nightmare, seduction and repulsion, myth and reality, desire and its atrophy, merge into one. It is a type of palimpsest where these conflicting realities are inscribed and re-inscribed with the passage of time. The exhibiting artists assembled in Hardbodies – Gary Carsley, Alex Gawronski, Angelica Mesiti, Peter Volich – explore this apparently simple, though in fact complex reality, through a critical and playful engagement with the mechanics of the billboards representational logic.
Image:
Gary Carsley, The Black Laocoon, 2010. Courtesy the artist & BREENSPACE, Sydney.
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