Artist Talks
Date: Saturday 14 May, 2pm
Cost: FREE!
Dangling Carrots is Michelle Hamer’s tenth solo show in just five years of exhibiting. Her hand-stitched tapestries on perforated plastic explore personal, suburban and urban limits. The works, based on Hamer's own photographs taken during the Global Financial Crisis, continue her interest in socio-historic documentation through signage.
This new series questions the ‘suburban dream’ ideal. Large tapestries of signage within everyday suburbia are accompanied by smaller tapestries of ‘No Road’ signage. Taken at different suburban edge locations these signs literally mark edges and raise personal questions of how to proceed when life appears to be a series of challenges. Dangling Carrots explicitly questions the contemporary relevance of the ‘suburban dream’ in a post GFC climate. How do we reconcile edges and endless sprawl with environmental ideals of greater density? Do our dreams have limits or is that just reality?
For the first time, Hamer will include digital projections (assembled by Cat Wilson), of the tapestry construction process, directly exposing the juxtaposition of manual and digital pixilation within her practice. The audience will be able to move through the projections, the pixels of light, creating a tapestry of new digital images on the wall.
Hamer’s works explore the small in-between moments of apparent ‘nothingness’ that characterise everyday life. She is particularly interested in contemporary societal edicts/ideals and the impermanent and in-between spaces as represented through signage and billboards. The traditional technique of hand-stitching is used to explore an ironic romanticism present between tapestry and the digitalisation of imagery in contemporary society.
Download pricelist here
This exhibition has been kindly supported by:
Photography: Lily Feng
