CAZ HASWELL : MADE IN THE SHADE
5 - 28 February 2015 @ Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney, Australia
“Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” – Michael Dobbs
The work for this show plays with the shifting locality between the private and the more public structural domains. The shapes, patterns, forms, materials and subject matter used in the works arise from this influence indirectly, across various dislocations of time and place.
Since setting up studio in my flat the domestic environment has started to slip into the form and pattern of my work. What I see in the surrounding buildings and houses outside the studio window has been influencing some of the subject matter of the work specifically for this show. Whether its the forms and material of ceramic chimney vents, the pattern of gridded gates or the copper of external plumbing. The domestic within and surrounding the studio has also started to have an impact on the development of the work such as my mattress cover or my neighbours doona hanging on the clothes line. The text works reference the domestic in a highly personalised way and the sexual undercurrent throughout most of the work refers to the interpersonal. Other works continue to make reference to broader structural narratives within the urban environment and the domestic stuff dumped around local neighbourhoods.
The titles of the works are sourced from an ongoing interest in slang, euphemisms and idioms suggestive of the narrative drama that plays out, in and around the domestic and urban environment as part of the tacit ground of informal thought and communication.
- Caz Haswell, 2015