HISTORY WILL MAKE WRECKAGE OF US, 2019
HD video (4'00"), mixed media, textiles.
First shown at Kudos Gallery, July 2018
Finalist in the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) 2019
HISTORY WILL MAKE WRECKAGE OF US considers tiny, intimate tragedies against the grand sweeping backdrop of History. An insurrectionary sheep sings a song about the saddest things she has ever known, and then lovingly decapitates Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
The installation wonders about the French Revolution (the messy birth of capitalism and bourgeois democracy) as a poetic bookend to the place we stand now (on the precipice of its collapse). It attempts to frame the ruined monarchs as both symbols of exploitative decadence in denial and decline, and as individuals perhaps astonished by fate. The work attempts to build a liveable present on the blood-slicked floorboards of the past.
Exhibition documentation by Zan Wimberly
Excerpt from video component Beast Trinity