Richard Horvath
Reimaginings @ Sorrento
9th June - 4th July 2022 Opening Event Saturday 11th June 2-5pm
Australia
& gallery Australia
@Sorrento @FED SQ.
163 Ocean Beach Road, Sorrento, Victoria Open 7 Days 10am - 5pm Sales: 0417 324 795 gallery@djprojects.net www.andgalleryaustralia.net Free Delivery & Installation within Victoria
Richard Horvath “A process worker in a muffler plant, a sailor on a ship plying the North Sea, a maintenance man on a N.A.T.O. base in Germany, a bartender and a worker in a darkroom at a screen printing studio were among the jobs I worked at during my late ‘teens and early twenties, however, it was the latter job that interested me the most and confirmed a love for the printing process. My early body of work included graphic art such as band posters, typified by a crude technique and a raw colour palette that encapsulated the Punk ethos and a selection of this work was acquired, much to my surprise, by the Print and Drawing collection at The National Gallery of Australia. After seeing a friend using 3D modelling software on a computer I resolved to learn this technology which lead to lecturing at R.M.I.T. university and repurposing the Punk style of graphic art I used. In 2010 I started the Re-Imaginings Project which had the broad agenda of reimagining, through the use of 3D computer graphics, some of the compelling visual ideas of the past and present which drives our culture.”
1. Bonjour Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Gustave Courbet’s 1854 painting, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, depicts the painter meeting his patron Alfred Bruyas and his servant Calas while travelling to Montpellier. I decided to recontextualise this painting not as a comment on the original work but as an observation of economic realities determining artists’ circumstances. It’s the narrative of the gentrification of neighbourhoods once deemed unattractive but affordable to creative people. The neighbourhood in this recreation could be faintly identifiable as a middle ring suburb in Melbourne after artists have been priced out of the fashionable older inner city. It’s a generic street with a Californian bungalow beside an unattractive brick newcomer, the Courbet stand-in is dressed in skinny jeans, a floral patterned body shirt and he fashionably wears his shoes without socks. His patron wears a flat cap, a trippy camouflage T-shirt and Birkenstock sandals and he is accompanied by a young Asian guy wearing a fedora hat and who is possibly his boyfriend. It’s a hipster vision of decade ago because the rumours I heard is that some of this demographic have given up on the city and have chosen to relocate to affordable country towns.
2. The Kiss Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Edvard Munch’s 1897 painting The Kiss, depicting a couple fused together in embrace has been interpreted by art historian Rheinhold Heller as suggesting “loss of individuality, a loss of one’s own existence and identity which hints at death,” which are themes that chime with Munch’s gloomy view of existence. Undoubtedly, this psychological reading is an interesting take on the artist’s work, but I chose to refocus it in another direction, infidelity, and despite some misgivings, I gave the piece a autobiographic slant by inserting objects from my past. The picture on the wall is a screen print of a couple whose relationship is probably souring was made in the years after graduating art school and the records strewn on the floor are a sampling of the type of music I played at the time. The pitiful sight of the woman outside in the dark looking in through the window is a scenario I had previously visited but chose to abandon because it felt too overwrought. It was a reversal of the kiss, the viewpoint was from outside with a man laid on the ground in darkness and a nearby dog balefully looking at him, he could have been drunk or he could have died from a broken heart because through a window, bathed in a cosy light, a woman with her man can be seen sensuously enjoying a dance.
3. The Guru Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The theme of this print came to me after listening to a podcast about the Manson family who committed the murder of the actor Sharon Tate in 1969. The event shocked people at the time because the concept of a cult was relatively unknown and the mass suicide and murder of the Jonestown massacre, a decade later in 1978, confirmed the sinister implications of cult psychology. The scene depicted in Guru looks relatively benign, it could be a harmless therapy session or a lecture about spiritual matters until a symbol such as the golden throne, with its suggestion of power and dominance, is perceived as a subtext of the social transaction of the group. Equally disconcerting is the wall plaque above the guru, a cosmic head emanating golden rays from its third eye and the legend “I am your Shepherd” which appears like a brooding Big Brother figure scanning the proceedings in the room. The weird shape of the plaque is intended to imply distorted meaning or a thought bubble reflecting the guru’s true agenda. The women are young and innocent, ideal as recruits into a cult to satisfy the leader’s sexual appetite and to attract men into the group, which was a strategy that Charles Manson used. The guru’s collarless shirt and vest were chosen partly as a reference to priest’s garb but more so as the type of clothing the wolf wears to mask his true purpose.
4. The Lictors Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 395mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Jacques-Louis David had a gift of creating visual art that served the goals of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Although his cool Neo-classical style doesn’t make for cosy art it certainly has an impressive formal power and it generally avoided crude political hyperbole. His painting, The Lictors Bring to Brutus The Bodies of His Sons, moralises about the virtues of upholding the ideals of the state even when it condemned Brutus’ sons to death for treason. It’s a solemn art work that exposes the horror and grief experienced by his family and it’s the section of this epic canvas detailing the reaction of his wife and daughters which I chose to focus on for this reimagining. The result is an odd mishmash of elements partially faithful to the David painting such as the background of heavy Roman columns, 1940s furniture which I thought most closely resembled David’s notion of Roman interior style and the trio dressed in clothes fashionable twenty years ago. The sheet strung up on the columns presented a mild technical challenge which I solved by photographing some bed linen hung from the back verandah of my house and saved for use as a texture map.
5. The Back Verandah Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 395mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Russell Drysdale’s 1942 painting, The Back Verandah, is a fairly minor yet charming work typical of the Australian outback subjects that he was known for. It is a portrait of a blue collar family seen at the back of their traditional Australian weatherboard cottage replete with a bench casually draped with a bed sheet, a millet broom, a towel hung on a nail hammered into the boards and discarded car tyres reused for plant pots in the dusty backyard. I have always had a fondness for this painting because its subject matter is familiar to me from the time spent living in the Australian bush in the 1950s when I was a child. This reimagining also serves as a reminder of the former mythologising of rural Australia before this country’s population became resolute urban coastal dwellers.
6. Selfie Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 395mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Two women pose for a selfie in front of a crime scene of a detective examining a body. This reimagining was inspired by reports of insensitive people deliberately seeking attention by uploading selfies taken near the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney in 2014, a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of two hostages and an Islamic extremist gunman who had suffered from mental health problems. The background setting is a sterile generic public building that is not dissimilar to the Lindt Cafe site and the only colours are the women’s tops, a symbol of their need to grab attention in a social media driven world where people’s attention is a highly sought commodity.
7. The Count Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The artist Christian Schad is noted for the portraits he painted during the 1920’s Weimar Republic period in Germany. They are typically descriptive and Schad didn’t resile from depicting his subjects’ sexual preferences. In the spirit of the republic’s sophisticated decadence, the count evidently had a liking for transvestite men as well as women, he was a man who, according to Schad, “was someone who could live only in a metropolis.”I’ve chosen a classically formal representation of the trio in this recreation that suggests the power imbalance when the wealthy and influential indulge in transactional sex. The count looks comfortable with his hands casually stuffed in his pockets while his consorts stand stiffly and expressionlessly by his side. Dressed in their diaphanous gowns they reflect their role as sexual objects easily accessible for the count’s pleasure.
8. The Siege Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The Siege was inspired by a 1911 photo showing a group of army riflemen and police officers laying siege to an East London house during a shootout with two Latvian anarchists. The event was notable for the presence of the British Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, who attended mainly out of curiosity rather than in an official capacity. The event was also notable as an early manifestation of political terror in a city tolerant towards refugees and it led to calls for the restriction of asylum seekers from the volatile regions of Europe. I chose to follow the original photo’s striking composition of the men, protected against the weather by heavy overcoats, staring in the direction of the gunmen. The simplified colour palette of muted grey, blue and brown is intended to respect the monochrome origins of the image and the psychological wintriness of inevitable death in a bleak urban landscape.
9. Riot Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The Ronald MacDonald doll, which was designed to draw young children to the McDonalds hamburger franchise, is a powerful corporate symbol. It can be viewed as representation of a culinary wasteland where the Golden Arches dominate the skyline of busy main roads cutting through newly built suburban tracts. In non-western countries MacDonalds seems quite alien, hence it’s unsurprising that when anti-western sentiments erupt McDonalds and KFC become primary targets. It was images of rioters burning a Ronald McDonald doll and tossing KFC buckets in the streets of Karachi which triggered this reimagining. The interpretation turned out to take on a ritualistic appearance unlike the chaos captured by the news photos. The rioters in these images wore the traditional shalwar kameez gown but I had no interest in a literal interpretation and dressed them in gym suits and baseball caps which imparts a paramilitary look and a seriousness of intent. Their pale blue outfits are part of a carefully structured colour palette with the inane Ronald McDonald lying on his future pyre in his usual colourful livery becoming the centre of attention. The grey silent observers ringed around the action look as if they are cast from concrete while the dreary car park is lit in a dull brownish light.
10. St Sebastion Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
As a high school teenager I was intrigued by the depiction of violence in the painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian by the Pollaiuolo brothers in the mid 1470s and how it compared to the violence I saw on television and at the cinema in the 1960s. My version is set in an suburban Australian court with an SUV vehicle parked in the driveway, one of the executioners is phoning his boss that the job has been done and a curious neighbour records the incident on her digital camera, possibly to upload to social media. The executioners have misused a utility pole for their deed, much like rural American vigilantes in the earlier half of the twentieth century did when they exercised mob justice.
11. Way Down in the Whole Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
This print was originally inspired by the theme music of the television series, The Wire. The song, penned by Tom Waits presents the life choices an individual can make in stark religious terms; by keeping the devil way down in the hole, bad choices such as drug addiction and criminal behaviour are avoided. The first version I made exploring this idea featured a suburban house at night when a muscular naked demon accosts a startled office worker returning home from work. This encounter between a law abiding citizen and a malevolent demon worked well enough but there were problems, the foremost being the demon sporting an aggressively prominent penis made it problematic for public exhibition, nonetheless I kept the file of the 3D scene. The following year I started work on a beach scene based on photos I had taken of a local camping ground. I soon found that this pleasant sunny scene missed a context which made it anomalous in this series where dark themes dominate. The solution was to extract the devil figure from the abandoned work and insert it as a disruptive element into this new project. The women’s holiday enjoyment is abruptly disturbed by the intrusion of this unwanted presence; one woman defensively wraps herself in a towel, another freezes mid-step while the female in the foreground protectively holds a beach ball when they spot the ‘devil’ emerging from the water. It reveals the unpredictable event we subconsciously dread when normal life takes a fateful turn.
12. Street View Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The massive collection of data for the Google Street View project inadvertently captured images of people engaged in unexpected activities while others, such as street sex workers, were photographed plying their usual business. Although the company was quick to mask their identity, photography enthusiasts appreciative of the unmediated rawness of the material saved the more eye-catching examples and this reimagining combines some of those social themes. The dusty yards, broken pavement and chain link fences that forms this urban landscapes tells stories of low incomes and low expectations. This reimagining features a flat and dreary landscape under a harsh midday light. It’s occupied by a fibro-cement clad house fronted by a brown summer lawn, a solitary hardy tree provides no shade and a cheap plastic chair offers little comfort for the sitter, they are certain indicators this real estate isn’t particularly desirable. The girls, one of who warily regards the camera while her friend spontaneously smiles for it, could be working or they could be going out for a bit of action.
13. Writing on the Wall Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The writing on the wall, a phrase that originated from a mysterious hand writing the words; Numbered, Weighed, Divided on a wall at a magnificent feast hosted by King Belshazzar, is synonymous with the prediction of doom. There are a some excellent artistic interpretations of this event, notably by the British artist John Martin in 1820 and Rembrandt in 1635. My interpretation is short on the drama both these paintings explore. A group of drinkers at a backyard BBQ analyse the meaning of the graffitied message that has appeared on a paling fence. They show curiosity but not alarm, possibly they are anaesthetised by the regular portentous warnings they hear about existential threats such as global warming.
14. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Much is left unsaid in Hilary Mantel’s 1987 novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, because the narrator is unsure about what is happening in the unfamiliar world she has reluctantly made a home in. The novel is based on the four years the author spent living amongst the expatriate community in Saudi Arabia and the texture of the story is framed by her status as an outsider in a society whose morals and politics are baffling to her. She is constantly guessing what the events she witnesses mean and the attitudes of her expatriate colleagues don’t help, they are there for the money and their feelings towards their host society are dismissive and often contemptuous. This reimagining shows the narrator reading the local news on a tablet device, her slumped shoulders and the instinctive grasping of the knees suggest unease, the empty wine bottle and glass reveal the consumption to alcohol her community turns to as a means of coping. The room has the bareness of a temporary dwelling, it is decorated in an insipid monochrome colour and the air conditioner is a defense against the relentless heat bathed city seen through the blueish tinted windows. Outside, a spiked gate indicates distrust of strangers, a freeway overpass implies that this is not a pedestrian friendly city, a police car visible through the left window is a metaphor of an authoritarian society and the distant buildings represent the twin pillars of corporate and religious power.
15. Parker Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Parker is the criminal protagonist of a series of novels by Richard Stark, a nom de plume of the author Donald Westlake. Parker is an amoral blank who is ruthless and efficient in his pursuit of money, an existentialist everyman inhabiting a landscape of generic American towns, a man without identity and emotion. The criminal tools of his trade are a gun and a car, hence the choice of situating him scoping out a vehicle in a dreary car sales lot wedged in by colourless concrete tilt slabs; it’s a monochrome place festooned with an inane inflatable happy face advertising man. This setting was informed by the photos of the American photographer, Stephen Shore, with his images of quotidian urban landscapes from his book Uncommon Places. Another notable influence was the 1967 John Boorman film made about Parker, Point Blank, where the city plays a significant role in situating his persona in a soulless corporate environment. For anyone wondering about the car dealer’s name, it’s an anagram of my surname, a choice dictated by my inability to think of anything better.
16. Riddley Walker Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The Russell Hoban novel Riddley Walker stands out for its singularly imagined post-apocalypse England. Language has broken down into a crude argot which Riddley uses to narrate his story, the survivors fear feral dog packs, they unearth old machinery so that the metal can be refashioned into primitive tools and entertainment consists of Punch and Judy shows and Riddley’s narration of the legends that serve as a warning against the use of the atom, the cause of their downfall. The legends he narrates speak of the atom as the “Li’l Shynin’ Man” who appears in this print between the antlers of a deer in the figure of tiny metallic man whose arms are outstretched in the form of a cross, a symbol about belief referencing the conversion of St Eustace to Christianity. The workers who have been busy digging out rusty old machines watch this phenomenon transfixed. One worker has the logo ‘Guy Montag’ on the back of his sweater which is a reference to the dystopian book burner described in the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. The company name Deckard which is stencilled onto the oil drum is the name of the replicant hunter in another great novel about a dystopian future, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream About Electric Sheep, familiar to many speculative fiction fans through the Ridley Scott movie adaption, Blade Runner.
17. Jacob Wrestling the Angel Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 445mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
Originally this reimagining of the Eugene Delacroix painting, Jacob Wrestling the Angel, was set at night with the figures portrayed as surfer types engaged in a wrestling match while in the background traffic goes about its business along a busy road heedless of the drama being played out. It was a nice idea, placing a mythical entity such as an angel in an environment that any urban dweller is familiar with, and despite much fooling about with lighting and moving figures around the composition I found the idea was impossible to realise successfully and opted instead to locate the action in a serene morning landscape. While this result misses the cultural juxtaposition presented by the original idea, the reduction of the composition into the simple elements of the figures locked in combat set against the greenery focused attention on fundamentals. Even though the combatants have fought throughout the night, Jacob is energetically pushing hard against the angel, almost pushing him off the little patch of grass hemmed by the shrubbery which acts as a makeshift wrestling ring. The wrestlers’ haircuts and summer clothes together with utility pole visible in the top right corner are a reminder that this is a modern take of an ancient mythical contest.
18. The Floor Manager Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
I generally despise social media except when I can engage with someone who is particularly knowledgeable in an area that intrigues me. One such person is a Russian man (I’ll keep him anonymous) who worked for the Ministry of Propaganda during the Soviet era. He also had access to a fascinating image archive. A follower of this man quizzed him about the decline of Russian manufacturing and he mischievously included a photo of factory shop floor shenanigans with his answer. It depicts a male floor manager fondling the breasts of a laughing female machine operator while an amused female coworker looks on. It’s behaviour that anyone who has endured mind numbing industrial process work would probably have witnessed in an age before such behaviour would have resulted in legal action. I have witnessed such behaviour when I worked in a press shop and the architecture of the industrial plant I have depicted does include a press in the background. The art work is a homage to all bored process workers who still exist in this post-industrial age and a remembrance of my teenage years when the sons and daughters of the working class joined their parents on the factory floor, hopefully only for the school holidays.
19. The Census Taker Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 445mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
China Mieville’s 2016 novella, This Census Taker, presents a world unlike any other postapocalypse future considered in this series of reimaginings. A young boy relates his story and the reader soon learns that he is an unreliable witness to events that make little sense in a world that is at best only vaguely comprehensible. The boy lives on a barren mountain with his emotionless mother and a father prone to episodes of psychopathic behaviour which the boy (and the reader) assume leads to the disappearance of his mother, presumably to join numerous small animals thrown into a deep pit by the enigmatic man. This event is a core of the narrative; however, typical of this book, it is presented without explanation as it joins the shrouded logic of much what occurs in this mysterious and evocative tale. The boy joins a group of children who live in a village in the valley, they catch bats from a bridge using bamboo poles and my initial inclination was to focus on this scene for this reimagining, but it was the isolated hut seen in a softly liminal light and the melancholic landscape which is the emotional linchpin I ultimately decided upon. The kneeling boy has found a key which was probably dropped by his father who makes them for a living while his mother, who we never get to know, watches impassively.
20. The Swing Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The Jean-Honore Fragonard painting, The Swing, is a memorable Rococo confection of delicate colour which depicts an aroused nobleman spying on a young woman on a swing. Her flouncy dress parts in the breeze, the artist suggests what he might see and it’s unclear whether she is complicit in a game of exhibitionism or a victim of voyeurism. This ambiguity has long fascinated scholars but readings of art can be subjective and are conditional of the values of the period in which they are made; one interesting interpretation comes from Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson who write in In Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo that The Swing is a “disguised representation of inverted sexual intercourse.” It’s the woman who is on top in this potential ménage-à-trois. I wasn’t aware of the article when I made this reimagining hence I was quite pleased when a female friend detected this frisson when I showed it to her. Another reason for making this was the forested setting and the technical challenge it presented in convincingly depicting such an environment.
21. The Daughter of Fu Manchu Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000 English novelist Sax Rohmer’s fictional character Dr. Fu Manchu is the archetypal super villain who sends stealthy assassins from his Oriental lair on missions to undermine western powers in his quest to further Chinese nationalism. The novels which embody the early 20th century colonial suspicion about Oriental political aspirations traded in stereotypes that were quite appealing to film makers working in a less politically correct era and who were purely interested in crude entertainment. One such film depicts Fu Manchu’s daughter instilling law and order with the aid of a lash in the doctor’s harem of comely looking western women who are predictably clad only in their underwear. I’ve long been an enthusiast of exploitation cinema but in my reimagining of the doctor and his daughter I’ve opted for a less salacious interpretation by presenting the ensemble of characters as a family portrait. The typical cinematic depiction of Fu Manchu as a lithe figure clad in a Chinese robe and cap and sporting a long thin moustache has been substituted by a muscular man dressed in a pale coloured business suit. With his stony expression and his hands hanging loosely by his sides, he exudes a powerful businesslike menace. His daughter is dressed in an elegant Chinese qipao and her stance echoes that of her dad as she is clearly following in his footsteps in managing the family business. The dacoit assassin stands in a military ‘at ease’ pose but his clothes are pure street thug and his position at the rear of the ensemble suggests both his stealthy profession as well as his lowly rank in the organisation. The middle aged female captive is presented as their prize, her seated position in front of her captors is characteristic of terrorist propaganda videos and her hunched posture recalls the passivity of prisoners uncertain of their fate. She is middleaged and it appears as if she has been yanked from comfortable suburbia into an unfathomable fate. She could represent senescent western nations struggling to maintain a prosperous and peaceful life in a politically unpredictable world but she is certainly intended as a poke at exploitation cinema that insists on comely young female actors with bountiful physical attributes. The objects in the room reflect the doctor’s polymath erudition and tastes but also symbolise his ambitions for power.
22. le Mepris Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
This reimagining strayed so far from its source that there is barely any point of reference left. Normally this would concern me, but as with many of the prints in this series I start out with a broad agenda to allow the work to develop a life of its own, so there is always a risk of that outcome. As it stood, I liked the result mainly for its visual style even though any narrative elements are residual. As with much of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave work, his film Le Mepris can be read on many levels, one of which echoed the breakdown of his marriage. The man in this image is so absorbed in reading that he has his back turned on his wife and the exotic surroundings. The latter half of Godard’s film is set in the extraordinary 1930’s rationalist house Casa Malaparte which is built on a vertiginous headland on the isle of Capri and here it has been substituted with a stark empty modernist box devoid of any furnishings that could be seen as a metaphor for the couple’s floundering relationship and a hollowed out modernity. The ancient statue hints at a richer past. This perception was noted in a review of the film by the New Times critic Bosley Crowther who wrote, “Mr. Godard has attempted to make this film communicate a sense of the alienation of individuals in this complex modern world.”
23. The Shore Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
I have long had a fascination with the idea of landscape reflecting a state of mind, an idea which I explored in the previous print of this series and returned to once more using Caspar David Friedrich’s 1808 -10 painting of a tiny solitary figure standing on a stormy shore as a point of departure. Friedrich’s composition, Monk by the Sea, is still a startling image two centuries after it was painted by a man who made a speciality of bestowing landscapes with moods that range from sublime to eerie. This reimagining doesn’t aim for an extreme emotion simply because I wanted to use the landscape I live in, one best described as intimate but exposed to the elements, particularly in winter. The long maroon dress worn by the woman gazing across the water was intended to alert the viewer that she’s there for a reason other than enjoying the view, an activity most locals do from inside their cars. The pine tree is a nod to a species commonly used as windbreaks and feature plantings that characterise many Australian foreshores.
24. Canticle for Liebowitz Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000 A previous work in this series is based on the Russell Hoban novel Riddley Walker, it is a challenging read about a possible fate that could befall civilisation. An equally testing read informed this reimagining; Canticle for Liebowitz. It was written by Walter M. Miller and it is based on the existential horror the young American bomber crew member experienced during the World War Two bombing of the sixth century monastery at Monte Cassino and it inspired his strikingly original vision of a post-apocalypse future. Canticle For Leibowitz is difficult to characterise; it’s profoundly thoughtful, frequently surreal, oddly comic and always thoroughly inventive. Slabs of latin exegesis punctuate memorable scenes such as breathless monks powering a hamster wheel to run a dynamo used to generate electricity for a single dim light globe. The monks labour for years on an illuminated manuscript copy of a holy relic, basically a blueprint of an electronic device discovered in some ruins and designed by an electrical engineer who is soon to be canonised as St. Liebowitz. it’s a document whose original purpose is completely obscure to the reverent monks and we may assume it contributed to the nuclear disaster .The setting centres on an isolated monastery in a post apocalypse desert in the US, and this together with the novel’s religiosity settled one decision — that the lighting has a pinkish tint bathing a landscape entirely devoid of greenery, much like the Hollywood bible movies of the 1950s. The chosen moment is the unexpected arrival of the peripatetic figure of the Wandering Jew, a wise but puckish presence who regularly reappears over the novel’s time span of millennia, and who frightens the novice monk sent into the desert by his abbot to prove his fitness.The concrete debris scattered over the landscape carries ominously prophetic graffiti quoting texts such as the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the eminently quotable Winston Churchill. A half buried sign bears the name New Rome which has become the post-apocalypse seat of the Catholic church, the institution who historically became the guardian of knowledge after the fall of old Rome. The eroded head which has a likeness to Julius Ceaser, the hovering vulture and the dynamo are the type of talismanic and atavistic objects that populate Miller’s densely symbolic narrative.
25. The Outsider Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
The Outsider was originally driven by the investigation of a 3D modelling technology called photogrammetry which is based on extracting a 3D model from a series of photographs. I live close to an ocean beach and during my regular walks I began to conceive of a project that married the idea of landscape with the human condition and where I could test the possibilities of photogrammetry software. The Outsider, a novella by the French writer Albert Camus, describes an incident when a French Algerian citizen arbitrarily murders an arab man on the beach. The philosophic core of the story hinges on Camus’ theory of absurdism, free will, morality and existentialism. These are weighty themes that are tough to visualise so I decided to focus on the solitary individual pondering his existence under an indifferent sky; simply put, the universe doesn’t care about any person’s life. The boulders, which were captured using photogrammetry, are set against a building storm and this landscape is intended to re-enforce the notion of a godless universe, a feeling I sometimes reflect upon during my walks which fortunately favour an appreciation of the natural world.
26. Jesus Franco Eurotrash Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 296 x 444mm $1,000 605 x 910mm $4,000
I have long been a exploitation cinema enthusiast and this reimagining of the lurid Jesus Franco movie, She Killed in Ecstasy, is very much in the same vein as a previous print in this series, The Daughter of Fu Manchu. Key features of this style of cinema are the ramping up of sex and violence and Franco showed very little restraint in this department. What is notable about She Killed in Ecstasy are the stylish sets and locations that reflected European avant-garde taste of the 1960’s and 1970’s. One example is Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill’s exquisite architectural statement, Xanadu, which is featured prominently in the latter half of the film but unfortunately I decided to omit it because of the difficulty involved with building the 3D model. Instead, for the exterior view I inserted the sort of generic holiday apartments designed for the package holiday tourist typical of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. I had no such problem with recreating the famous ‘Blow Chair’ which is the piece of inflatable furniture which prominently occupies the foreground of the composition. Its inclusion is intended to impart a certain sensuality which I suspect doesn’t translate into actual comfort in real life. Unlike Franco, who wastes little time propelling the action into the direction expected by the audience of exploitation cinema, I decided pose the two women at the point they are assessing one another’s desirability with the woman on the right signaling her desire by slightly spreading her legs and the woman in the foreground lifting her foot as a sign of consent.
27. The Harem Digital print on aluminium. Editions of 5 444 x 296mm $1,000 910 x 605mm $4,000
The Harem was made in response to a video about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his ‘Pleasure Squad.’ It’s a squad of the most beautiful women in the country who are there for the pleasure of that man only and the women are given no choice in the matter. The cliches dictators are prone to are visible in the background; the cult of personality golden statue includes a figure with a cape suggesting he is about to segue into a comic book super hero. The justification for his alleged quasi-divinity is neatly encapsulated by the latin inscription on the facade of the mock temple, DEUS VULT, God wills it.