18 Lives (the installation)
18 Lives in Paradise. Detail of 1 box. 50x50x50cm. Offset lithography on cardboard. Photo: Christian Capurro
18 Lives in Paradise (the installation) Artspace, Sydney. 20 July – 21 August 2011
This installation incorporates 300 boxes. There are three types of boxes of 100 each.
This solo exhibition is programmed alongside artists Praneet Soi and Deborah Kelly
From the Artspace website:
“18 lives in Paradise takes form as a makeshift wall, representative of a barrier or border to demarcate the poles of inclusion and exclusion, functioning to protect or prohibit. In a reconfigured form, these blocks may also be read as a totem, a beacon to guide or an epitaph to commemorate; a way to look to the future, or to the past.
Comprising a series of eighteen images screen-printed on cardboard boxes, the various compositions create an alluring metaphor of what it is to construct a picture of exoticism. Sourced from found postcards, the images range from the early to mid twentieth century, representing a curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, distant landscapes, missionaries and military servicemen. The images come together as an assemblage of oddities representing the collisional paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented for curiosity and those of a dominant culture who have colonised, either briefly or permanently, both land and people for wealth, resources, labour and pleasure.
The boxes emulate the form and materiality of the commonplace courier box, utilized for transitting of cargoes and resources from one location to another, these are vessels within which many anonymous contents shift between hands, between custodians, between owners. These blocks operate as signifiers of the gaze, referencing what has been discovered and captured, while their content remains vacuous. “
The basic unit used in 18 Lives in Paradise is a cardboard printed box 50 x 50 x 50 cm. The boxes are the building blocks for a sculpture, wall or any other structure.
The box is also a parody of the courier box – those containers daily transported around the globe in the vast movement of lives and identities today. What was thought of as fixed may not be so.
The images are sourced from postcards. The postcards range from the early to mid-twentieth century and form part of a worldwide curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, environment and resources …The images come together as an assemblage of ‘freaks’ and represent the collision paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented out of curiosity and those belonging to dominant cultures who have used the land and its people for entertainment and wealth.
18 Lives in Paradise can form a column or wall. It can be a barrier, a beacon or epitaph. En masse, the boxes are a symbol of many lives whose identities are sometimes twisted for the gaze of the curious world.
Brook Andrew 2011
