ANNA HOYLE

Exhibition opens Wednesday 18 March, 6pm
To be opened by Helen Campbell, Assistant Curator Australian Art
Art Gallery of New South Wales


My longstanding interest in suburban gadgetry has urged me to re-think gym-equipment. In both my massive and miniature, coloured and glittered ink drawings, gadgets slip from the mechanical to the organic or ornate. These intensely busy, ‘all over field’ drawings intend to mimic the excesses of consumer culture. Kooky text taken directly from gym-world advertising (spruiked by my character Goatee Spruiker) is embedded in the drawings to highlight the humorous and absurd side to our gadget driven world.

The Moai (Easter Island Statues) are inspired by contemporary vogue for ‘exotic’, ‘primitive’ carvings and garden ornament. They may also remind us of the demise of a land and culture due to unchecked consumerism and over exploitation of natural resources. The quasi-deer/Bambi motif cavorts around the picture space as the darling of ‘animal of commodity culture’ and foil to the gadget world. Other creatures inhabit my drawings as a means to animate this nonsensical world. Here they become agents of the absurd, complicit in consumerist dependency on objects/gadgets and experts in googly eyed kitsch aesthetics.

An imaginative play with objects and motifs is a critical tool for me to reconcile and reflect upon existence with material excess. In this way, I love to be both critical and celebratory of aspects of consumer culture.


- Anna Hoyle, 2008