Image: The Prince (installation) 2013. Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. Photo: Mick Richards
24 May – 7 July 2013
A Rockhampton Art Gallery Exhibition sponsored by Lexus of Rockhampton.
In New York in the late 1970s a young Richard Prince, working in the tear sheet department at Time Life, began to manipulate images from advertising, reconfiguring them as his own and, in the process, creating some of the most contentious and iconic work of the twentieth century.
Prince's 're-photographs' of Marlboro cigarette advertising without logos reclaim the iconic hero of the frontier - the American cowboy - from the clutches of commercial advertising. Some 30 years later Queensland artist Michael Zavros revists Prince's Untitled (cowboy) series in his recent work. Spanning over 15 years of the artist's practice, this exhibition brings together the Prince/Zavros series of drawings and paintings, as well as paintings of interiors, earlier works of men's fashion drawn from commercial advertising and 'TV' paintings.
Through Zavros' appropriated appropriation - photography via painting - the work of Richard Prince is re-presented to a contemporary audience, for whom, arguably, the original context of cigarette advertising is redundant. The Prince/Zavros series is quite simply, romantic, and reminds us of the power of a great image and the potency of a single idea.
Pixy Liao
Born 1979 Shanghai, China; lives New York, United States of America
Pixy Liao uses photography, video, and installation to question stereotypical representations of couples, artists, and the female experience. Some of these intimate, humorous photographs are from Liao’s Experimental Relationship project, 2007 – ongoing. For Liao:
As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro. Since he is 5 years younger than me, I felt that whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became the person who has more authority & power. One of my male friends even questioned how I could choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend. And I thought, ‘Damn right! That’s exactly what I’m doing, & why not?!
In her photographs, Liao often portrays herself in a dominant role while her boyfriend assumes a more submissive position in order to break the predominant relationship model and experiment with new modes of being together.
Lin Zhipeng (aka No. 223)
Born 1979 Guangdong, China; lives Beijing, China
Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) is a leading figure in contemporary Chinese photography. Selfnamed after the lovelorn Hong Kong police officer in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, 223’s photographs capture the need to love in an otherwise indifferent society. Documenting the ecstasy, eroticism and esotericism of life amidst an often-closed traditional culture, his photographs act as a collective not-so-private diary of a generation pushing against the limits of the rigid social rules of conservative Chinese society. This presentation is comprised of photographs, dating from 2007 which demonstrate the arcs and parameters of his practice. Confidently flash-lit and playfully posed 223’s photographs show you that relationships will continue even as they change. Your friends will grow old, their homes might shift from Beijing to Paris, and some lovers may depart while others choose to stay. In 223’s photographs we see bodies immersed in milky waters or decisively slumped against the wall. These are bodies that are not explicitly working but neither are they at rest. Embodying the messiness of human relationships, his work is equal parts surprising and sanguine, mundane and melancholic, yet always beautiful.
Installation Images
