Pat Hoffie 31 January - 3 March 2013
“Pat Hoffie’s project focuses upon Australian identity, not as it is considered and constructed in Australia, but rather, how it is interpreted and propagated externally. As an artist who has invested significant periods working in and with the various communities of nations in the Asia-Pacific region, her work frequently focuses on issues of cultural exchange and social justice. This project emerges out of periods of research in Bali, the Indonesian province most favoured by Australian holidaymakers. In this region, the local economy and infrastructure have been recalibrated to the tastes of tourists, at odds with the broader culture of Indonesia. Of the many tourist-oriented products that have become prevalent in Bali are crudely sloganed t-shirts, novelty hats, and of pertinence to Hoffie’s project, bumper stickers. These items are sold almost exclusively to Australian tourists, and indeed, are produced solely for their demand. As a way of connecting the distribution of these paraphernalia with the actual traditions and customs of production in Indonesia this project involves the engraving of banks of these stickers by traditional Balinese wood carvers. In the form of stickers, these slogans are disposable souvenirs of a particular type of humour, but in this more elaborately laboured form they are rendered into artifacts that warrant closer scrutiny, as objects embodying some of the inherent complexities of cultural exchange.”
SOURCE: http://www.artspace.org.au/gallery_project.php?i=175
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