Tales from Hyperreality

The images in the exhibition explore Australia’s relationships with the history of the old world. Each image is an amalgam of locations from UK and Europe and the skies of Tasmania. Each also includes a bird (from another location) that represents the artist as an intrusive narrator, casting an eye over the landscape and telling its story. Here he is suggesting that the ‘history’ we consume as visitors/tourists to the old world, looking back over our colonial past, does not reflect the reality, but rather a fabrication now seen as real. The works further heighten the sense of disconnect between the real and the hyperreal: the ‘places’ presented as real are artificially, and clearly, symmetrical, which represents order. Various devices and statues, that are separate from the symmetry, accentuate the fabrication.