Victim of Late Capitalism (2021) is Hana Earles’ latest solo show at Meow2, which she curates with Calum Lockey and Brennan Olver out of a small West Melbourne terrace house turned studio gallery. The bulk of her new works are collages of advertisements ripped from magazines and duct-taped over deconstructed stretcher bars and carboard in place of traditional picture frames.
Lovely Monster (2021) immediately puts the frame and the gallery centre stage by assembling a medley of magazine ads for products like perfume and Dyson hairdryers around the cardboard-stretcher bar outline at imperfect angles and odd contours, with the picture at the centerpiece replaced with a square gap through which the gallery’s blank white wall can be glimpsed. My Repression Album (2021) and My Repression Diary (2021) do much the same but with an emphasis on the collage that was somewhat obscured by the duct tape in the previous work, so that we can clearly see magazine cut-outs of Rihanna and someone brandishing a gun along with ads for bracelets, Saint Laurent, the Samsung Galaxy, the iPhone and an actual old iPhone stitched around the frames. Two other works, My Repression Mixtape (2021) and I Hate My Parents (2021), displace the border between inside and outside even more by having the frame slice through the centre, slicing in two the blank white square of the gallery wall in a way that brings to my mind Mallarmé’s ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’, as it sees the poem jump across the spinal abyss separating the two pages. This is all amidst an aura of commodity fetishes for more Dyson hair dryers, Diesel, Pokémon, Apple, HP laptops, jewellery, natural medicine, Rolex watches and Hollywood celebrity Übermenschen Adam Driver and Charlize Theron, as well as a botched polaroid.
Vincent Le is a catastrophe-drunk philosopher and PhD candidate at Monash University. He has taught philosophy at Deakin University and The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He has published in Hypatia, Cosmos and History, Art + Australia, Šum, Horror Studies and Colloquy, among other journals. His recent work focuses on the reckless propagation of libidinal materialism.
