Don’t Look Away!
A prolific hyperproduction and sense of take-over lifted the Brio’s head out of the fray.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my writings about contemporary artworks that were perhaps overly steeped in the heaviness of historical and ongoing trauma without fully grappling with other deregulating energies — scrappiness, coolness, abundance, tall tales, and piss-takes. These entanglements not only provide moments of levity within traumatic storying, as well as sometimes profound relief and jibing political critique. They also can refuse demands for certain cultural and personal stories while offering an unflinching picturing of the whole tangled mess of settler-colonial Australia.
Related
I have begun to desire noise. Noise that prompts. Maybe wounds. I want to remember something that feels tangible, and if I have no memory of how this feels I want to create one.
Edie Duffy’s photorealism doesn’t just document—it distorts. Mining eBay’s throwaway images, she renders objects with a fixation that turns the banal into the surreal, collapsing nostalgia, obsolescence, and digital-age vertigo into a vision both unsettling and precise.
