Beautiful Terrors

BEAUTIFUL TERRORS
9 September- 4 October 2008
 

SERIES NOTES
 
Beautiful Terrors exposes the ironies, confusions and reality of living in an uncertain global universe.  The exhibition features artists Brit Bunkley, Michele Bevoors, Scott Eady, Lynn Hurst and Christian Keinstar who bring topical political, social and environmental issues bluntly to our attention. 
 
Concerns such as “overpopulation, rampant consumerism, fossil fuel consumption and global warming, savvy terrorist attacks all have their finger on the doomsday button.”  
 
The represented artists uniquely demonstrate the ineffectual and indifferent way major political, religious and social organisations deal with issues of magnitude in a global world.  
 
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
 
Brit Bunkley juxtaposes ideas of nuclear explosion with both the beauty and sublimnity that such a spectacle would produce.  His witty concepts also expose our indifference to the possibility of such an occurrence through the use of humour.  Bunkley’s Mushroom Cloud is a diminutive collectable in the image of a nuclear explosion. On one level, the quaint object is a metaphor for the horror and terror which would accompany such a catastrophe.  But on another more telling level, Bunkley reminds us of societies’ tactless indifference and acceptance of war and destruction, by coating the issue in cuteness in the form of this little collectable which we can safely consign to the curiosity cabinet.

Michele Beevors critiques capitalist ideology.  Issues of cyclical consumption resulting from an overload of commodification and mass advertising lie at the heart of social disorder and alienation.  “The pure commodity form is one that obeys the law of planned obsolescence, over and over again almost instantaneously, worn out by the time you have unwrapped the package.”   The full effects of such cycles are yet to be felt environmentally and in the extension and promotion of inter-generational poverty cycles.  
 
Social confusion and bigotry fundamentally inform Scott Eady’s work. His sculpture Boy shows a child in soldier’s camouflage playing with nude male dolls in a rugby scrum.  Deftly enclosing a myriad of social, political and cultural concepts in a single image, Eady demonstrates that as a society we lack understanding and tolerance of individuality and difference.  We are also reminded that entire populations are conscripted to war, including children, at once alienating and robbing them of their innocence and natural transition into adulthood. 
 
Christian Keinstar’s Churches literalises the “disintegration of religion and spirituality” as a symbol of goodness in the fight against evil. Once the “ideological and spiritual glue of society”, religion and transcendent faith have long been symbolised by the erection of powerful edifices around the world in the name God’s enlightening influence over man on earth. Keinstar graphically illustrates that while the church and religion have claimed much, they have delivered little in addressing global suffering.  The ability of religious intolerance to start wars which devastates whole populations continues to affect us globally. 
 
The “continuing involvement with ideas pertaining to perceptions of gender, objectification, alienation and the dehumanising effects of technology…” lie at the centre of Lynn Hurst’s work.  By bringing together the ultimate symbol of Victorian domesticity in the crocheted handkerchief with imposed images of death and destruction at the hands of conventional and nuclear war, Hurst exposes the hypocrisy of the west.  Through colonisation and imperialism, large parts of the third world have been manipulated in the name of progress. Nuclear testing in the Sth Pacific by the French is a case in point.