Endless Summer chronicles one man’s obsession with sunglasses. The exhibition consists of a sequence of portraits of the man wearing his collection of sunglasses, in which each of the 37 images is the same except he’s wearing a different pair – one for every summer of his life. Adopted by twentieth-century fashion and celebrity culture, sunglasses are revealing embodiments and representations of human desire. Endless Summer looks at the psychological and cultural aspects of sunglasses, focusing on them as objects and instruments of altered perception. The work sets up a comparison between sunglasses, photography and vision, exploring the implications of lens and framing, as well as the varying capacities of each to contain time and memorialise.
Extract from Endless Summer: a monologue for an installation:
“My first pair of sunglasses were aviators. I bought them before I came to Australia. My love for aviators has stayed with me from being a young kid in Croatia when the tourists used to come in on the boats. Lots of local boys worked on the overseas ferries too and they would come back wearing aviator sunglasses. All the boys getting off the boat had them… that was where my fascination started. The boys were so brown, always laughing, their heads thrown back, the sea bluer than ever, their hair slicked and styled… Everything was so fabulous in the shiny reflections of those sunnies. [Scratching his scalp thoughtfully] It was the mid-to-late seventies, or the early eighties. It was before Top Gun, actually, and they were teardrop-shaped and rounded, with metal rims and that real elephant bone bit in the middle of them, a kind of exotic circle of ivory.”
Lily Hibberd is a visual artist who works with painting, photography and installation. She has held eleven solo exhibitions since 1998, in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Recent solo exhibitions include: I want to break free, Karen Woodbury Gallery (2006); Dangerous Liaisons, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda (2005); Paint Tin Fantasias, The Farm, Brisbane (2004); and Blinded by the Light, exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth; Bus Gallery, Melbourne, and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (2003-04). As founding editor of un Magazine, she is actively involved in the publication of arts writing and is a frequent contributor to various visual art forums, including recent contributions to Japanese journal ARTiT, The Artreader (APT5 critical reader), and co-edited (with Natasha Bullock) issue 76 of Photofile in 2005. Lilly Hibberd is represented by Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne and is a current resident of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.
Artist's website: <www.lilyhibberd.com/>
The soundtrack for ENDLESS SUMMER, Sunglasses and the Spectacle of Vision, will be broadcast on Writer's Radio, Radio Adelaide 101.5 FM this coming Monday 13th October at 3.30pm. The broadcast will be repeated at midday on Saturday 18th October. And if you miss the broadcast slots, download the podcast from radio Adelaide' website www.radioadelaide.edu.ua/writersradio
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