This project is a series of five 1 x 1.4 metre posters featuring paintings of unfamiliar objects, promotional text and diagrammatic imagery pasted in traditional advertising spaces throughout Melbourne.
By combining the familiar cadence of promotional rhetoric and graphic design structures with the imagery of unrecognised objects, unfamiliar significations, and an ordinal logic just beyond the logic of the ordinary, the posters create an absurd and surreal visual landscape in their promotion of limitless and revelatory possibilities but with the safety and restriction of curated predictability.
The focal point of the works is a series of unfamiliar objects; fake and non-functional tools which appear as paintings and photographs. Whilst the vocabulary and imagery around the tools suggests that they might be used for a specific purpose, that purpose itself is alluded to only indirectly. By fetishizing the aesthetic of functionality, the works seek to create the opposite effect, emphasising the appeal and spiritual significance of the exploratory and ambiguous imagined worlds that the works point to.
The project responds to the impact Covid-19 has had on arts and art spaces by taking artistic projects into spaces traditionally occupied by advertising. During the pandemic, artists inhabited digital arts communities and created work in domestic settings. The posters combine digital graphic design processes with tactile acts of painting and sculpting, placing these combined mediums in geographic public places. At a time of re-emergence from the domestic sphere, the posters appear in public spaces as hybrid elements, pointing both towards the world of direct experience and, through their graphic elements and QR code, back to the digital world. The works respond to the loss of art spaces and infrastructure by populating commercial spaces and seeking to divert the momentary attention of the passer-by to a transportive and unfamiliar realm, only a second glance beyond the commonplace veneer of the advertising framework.
The multi-stage process of creating sculptures, which then became the inspiration for paintings and photographs, which became the basis for the visual content of the posters, and finally the text and graphic design, is a process that has been largely shaped by the impossibility of presenting physical works during the pandemic. Whilst the “aura” of the base structural works has been somewhat lost through the impossibility of presenting them in a more direct way, the vortex of the artistic process has allowed for a more direct presentation of the artistic vision through the creation of an integrated visual landscape.
The posters have a dual action whereby they both sell the excitement of new possibilities, and then render these impossible by packaging them in a predictable framework of advertising rhetoric. In Expedition to the Bermuda Triangle the promise of seeing mysterious and unexplained phenomena is undermined by the predictability of a meticulously planned tour. In No More Unknown the excitement of space travel and exploration is contrasted with the encroachment of technology into every part of the natural world.
The posters also function on a psychological level, contrasting the allure of new experience and possibilities with the comfort of predictability, promising impossible psychological states where both will be simultaneously attained. The Cycles Of Sun Are One speaks of hydrological cycles, weather cycles, the closure of mental cycles and the need for certainty. The mystical imagery is tempered by the packaging of the information into an educational course for the achievement of a tangible qualification. Comprehensive Rotational Planning offers predictability and reliability in the face of finite rotations around the sun. It speaks of direct and tangible outcomes rather than open-ended experience, reducing and flattening uneasily defined elements. Double Resolution promises the attainment of two contradictory outcomes at once, wonder at the unknown and the comfort of reversibility.
