BREAKING UP TO DISAPPEAR
Luke Letourneau
The BREAKUP represents a chance to indulge. In July I curated this exhibition as an avenue to examine separations. I asked the artists to look at reactions, at ruptures, at disappearing comforts. The work presented dissected periods of transition from one physical and/or emotional place to another as a way to depict shifting identities.
Brenton Alexander Smith has Elvis Presley serenading his own reflection. ‘The King Breaks Up With Himself’, two videos shown on monitors that faced each other, was exhibited at the back of the main room.
Syncing a recording of ‘Love Me Tender’ from the Ed Sullivan Show over two monitors, the artist initially appears to be unpacking the narcissism and the desperate longing to connect that follows a desire to be loved. Initially, Presley performs as a tender lovesick character, but the façade breaks once the audience’s swoons chime in. Now, this is the King – being adored by an invisible audience. His melancholy expression has shifted to a smirk. We see him adoring himself. What initially seemed human and sincere instead comes off as synthetic and rehearsed.
Then, a clicking sound interrupts, and slightly delays one of the videos. A technical error collapses the synchronicity, rupturing the reflections. The singing is delayed in one, mashing the individual sound sources into a haunting reverberation. The artist has created a cyborg other and then destroys it as an avenue to examine, amongst other things, the new life that can be created when the known and the comfortable fail.
The BREAKUP presented the work of 11 artists who, in some way, have engaged with representing the process of becoming, and the destruction of attachments. Primarily selected from existing works, the exhibition was somewhat erratic in how diverse the positions of the voices were. While this does not exactly mean the exhibition was entirely populated by the autobiographical, there was a great sense of the work being utilised as vessels of confrontation with surrounding attitudes. The exhibition was often unreasonable and uncomfortable in its frankness. But, The BREAKUP was conceived to ask audiences to fall into many heads in the hope that one would consider how they themselves react.
The screen as a portal into paradisiacal worlds is a key idea that informed the series of painting presented by Lucy Zaroyko. Drawing inspiration from both early 90s video games and her navigation of natural landscapes the artist builds a series that represents the impact that a world filled with representations of representations has on memory.
The 90s games influence is strong not only in the titles of work, ‘Bonus Room’, ‘Hidden Fountain’, but also, evident by her incorporation of grids, quais-pixelated images and her vibrant but analogous colour pallet. This is a series concerned with the way access to digital technologies continues to challenge the process of seeing and how this helps us define how we see. The artist examines the changing nature of sites of the body, and sites of place where screens are constantly presenting conflicting representations of an explored physical world. In her work Zaroyko presents a new world, yet so similar to the one we know, or at least how we remember it.
My role for this exhibition was to present, like a school Fete Haunted House ride, the multiple and divergent turmoils of the emotional in-between. The exhibition placed together the political and deeply personal in an attempt to capture the way art can be used as a tool to exploit limits, and the new life that can be created when doing so.
A break up ruptures you from the known and the static, and launches you into a somewhere. In The BREAKUP you flail between forms, and it requests you relish ambiguity.
'The King Breaks-Up With Himself' (Brenton Alexander Smith) “The BREAKUP” - exhibition name 2014. Installation view at 107 Projects, Redfern. Photography by Jack Condon
