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By: Damien Worst
Date: 13th Sep 06
Medium: Mixed
Drink: Bottle of red
What:
MILES HIGH Death of Cool
Where:
Victoria Park Gallery, 250 Johnston Street, Abbotsford
When:
Opening Wed September 13, 6.30 - 8.30
Runs until September 30. Open Wed-Sat 12-5
Contact:
Victoria park gallery online
How much:
Free
Art's physicality evokes responses outside of our control, and toying with our sense of material disgust or vertigo can push us to experience immediate forces. Despite the fact that these moments have their own traditions in art, they still hold raw power. The first attraction is that when you force a body to send fight-or-flight signals to the brain, it can't get lost in the endless interpretive game of art. It’s hard to work out the artist's comment on postmodernity if your reptile brain is telling you to run like hell.
MILES HIGH Death of Cool is a bloody, paranoiac carnival of intensity and emotion, and luckily for us, it opens tonight. The exhibit is a garbled cry against the civility of a chemically castrated world that assaults viewers without ever treating them like a student of a lost cause. The game of the body is turned on its head, without the heavy weight of psychology, or the stone of interpretation around its neck. The airplane, that symbolic bastard, is re-imagined in this exhibit alongside a furious manifesto against fruit. Let the bodies hit the gallery floor.