Dissent was an entry for Sculpture By The Sea Bondi 2014. It was accepted for the exhibition, but unfortunately I was unable to secure funding to cover the estimated $15,000 construction cost, and so I had to withdraw from the exhibition.
The work combines the pipe and valve material language of my steel sculpture, with the massing and repetition of objects that is a part of my wall sculpture and photographic practice. It arrays a field of identical (but for one) anthropomorphised valve figures, whose arrangement creates dynamic moiré patterns as clear lines of sight through the work appear, shift, and then disappear.
My goal was to capture an experiential quality similar to that which I felt while standing amidst Antony Gormley’s A field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. However, rather than the godlike delight one feels while standing within Gormley’s work, looking down at the upturned faces, and perhaps naive adoration from the figures, it is my intent for the viewer to experience something else – that precise moment for a person in power, at which the spell of obsequious conformity amongst countless supplicants is broken by a single dissenter returning their gaze.
The dissenter either proves us wrong, or forces us to be more right.
