From Andrew Frost…
When an artist is described as being ‘hot’ it’s usually a description of where they are in their careers. Their work is ‘hot’ too – in demand, up for sale, or even sold out, thereby upping the desirability of their future work and feeding back into that sense of hotness. For everyone who isn’t the artist there’s a strange desire to get in on the action somehow, to commune with the excitement of the artist’s career and maybe even pick up one of their works, a kind of madness driven by the fear of missing out. Taking this mania as its title the exhibition #FOMO brings together the work four artists – two emerging and two mid career – who themselves could be described as ‘hot’ and whose work is both highly desirable and weirdly about this whole game of attraction and desirability.
Louise Zhang’s work revels in layers of attraction and repulsion and her Superficial Powers [2014] is a quasi-painting that mixes materials both superficially attractive but in some uncanny way just a bit too much. Liam Benson’s decorative pins capture a kind of glam campiness that declares admonitions, celebratory statements that come with a negative aura. Tully Arnott’s Lonely Sculpture is a mechanised sculpture with a prosthetic finger that repeatedly updates a social media app while Crinea Court’s Mountain Views is a series of works that puts narcissism back into the realm of the sublime. #FOMO is an odd beast but one with beauty at its heart.
Until August 2
Artereal Gallery, Rozelle
Pic: Liam Benson, I Know (gold), 2013. Glass seed and bungle beads, sequins, cotton, organza, bamboo embroidery hoop, crystal diamantes, 11cm diameter.
