projects
text :: electronic text :: image

 

Resilience
a public art concept for QUT Creative Industries Billboard (shortlisted)
Brisbane, 2004
 

 

Art Direction & Development: Linda Carroli
Photograph: JM John Armstrong

This artwork is a text-based image based on the words, 'Let's face it'. The text appears on a white background with the letter filled with images. The text stretches across the entire breadth of the billboard with a lower portion assigned for the publication of credits and other information.

The image is assembled from photographed clusters of ceramic figurines with cartoonish and cutesy features such as wide-open eyes and pastel colours. The eyes are looking straight on, as if looking to the future, reminiscent of a revolutionary or propaganda type image intended to foster or bolster a sense of hope and aspiration.

There is an intended kind of jokey literalness in the image and its relationship to the words. The billboard (as site) is ideal for this type of artwork as it confounds the separation of image and text.

'Let's face it' is one of those expressions that allude to a 'home truth', something that's patently obvious yet often denied. Currently, the concept of resilience - in these sense of steeling oneself - has developed strong cultural currency with much discussion about the need for more or better social and indivudal resilience; hence the title of the work. The figurines, as ceramic and porcelain pieces, are actually quite fragile and breakable - not particularly resilient at all but often enduring.

The state may also evoke the question, 'Face what?', and thus has a quality of throwing back to the audience for some kind of completion or extension. As a simple, everyday expression, which is often intended to shake people into some semblance of acceptance or resignation, it is quite vague and open to interpretation. In this sense, it is anticipated that the text will have a 'prickling effect': prickle at the consciousness like an affirmation or unanswered question. However, refusal is also an option!

In this respect, the ''it' can become quite a complex notion and/or can prompt an ongoing thought process or reiteration. Perhaps it means 'I.T.' (information technology) and the changing landscape of communication, education and indeed creative industries. Perhaps 'it' is the new creative industries precinct itself. Perhaps 'it' refers to change more generally: the weather, our working conditions, consumerism, the economy, art, the future. Perhaps 'it' is a reference to the myriad concatenations rumbling around people's minds as they drive to work or pass through the new precinct. Perhap 'it' is the 'it factor'.

Likewise, by saying 'let's', a collectivity is presented as a possibility. How are we - perhaps as one of many 'we's' - to address (or face) this unknown it?