Damask/FDC Construction Fitout Refurbishment, 2014.
Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.
Argyle/John Holland Construction
Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.
Herringbone/Richard Crookes Constructions
Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.
Tapestry/Tony Owen Partners, 2014.
Inkjet Print on Museum Velum, 42cm x 29.7cm.
Empire explores transformations of residential spaces and housing systems in
contemporary cities under post-colonial capitalist regimes. Empire focuses on buildings undergoing
residential re-purposing in Sydney’s inner west – a site of gentrification and
class-based displacement. The work responds to critical axioms of political economy:
capital colonises ever-new spaces; capitalist landscapes are unstable;
infrastructure melts into air; bourgeois architectural systems, interior and
exterior, are constantly reworked in the pursuit of profit. In capitalist
housing ventures, economic, financial, material and aesthetic systems intersect
to ensure the survival of capitalism. These spheres ‘infect’ each other:
bourgeois aesthetics are an avenue for propagating and selling ever-more
profitable housing systems. Infrastructure, economics and taste inflect each
other. As such, capitalism colonises home environments, just as it has
colonised the globe.
Empire explores these concepts through photomontage, and the juxtaposition of
‘viral’ interior and exterior housing structures – fabrication and textiles.
The cross-infection of interior and exterior systems provokes consideration of
how capitalism invades interstitial spaces to colonise intersecting systems at
the same time. Capitalism ‘re-knits’ interconnected spaces – the private and
the public, the internal and the external – in order to ensure its enduring
success. Textiles and viruses are significant motifs of
colonisation. Textile manufacturing was integral to the development of modern
urban-industrial capitalism, and a critical market for international
competition (which sometimes took martial as well as commercial forms).
Meanwhile, the imperial expansion of capitalist nation-states from Europe
across the world led to the international exchange and global transmission of
new viruses and diseases (e.g. Syphilis, Ebola, HIV) – while
imperial-capitalism itself spread virally, reaching into and integrating all
corners of the globe.
Installation photograph, COFA, D Block, 29 October 2014.
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