1 - 25 June 1995

TOWARD GRACELAND (INSTALLATIONS FROM THE HOME OF ELVIS, PRISCILLA AND LISA MARIE)

L. E. Young

"Toward Graceland" consisted of furniture and domestic interiors constructed by the artist referencing ideas of sixties and seventies opulence best exemplified in the interiors of Graceland. Such interiors, with the mirrored cocktail cabinets and white silk sheeted beds, with their radios embedded in the bed head, speak about kitsch, but also spoke about the sublime. Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie are a royalty - and royal family - without nationality, and the values that they represent are those of a transcendence available to all. Elvis and Priscilla are of the people, rather than being above aspiration, as previous nobilities were. They represent the outer limits of aspiration: dreams and desires stretched and made hallucinatory, but never floating away entirely, as they are tethered to the realms of possibility. The works in the exhibition - the gingham cloth table bearing two loaves of bread positioned under a massive picture of the Matterhorn, with yodelling emanating from hidden speakers; the shiny satin of the King-sized bed, its valance animated and moving in generated drafts, took the objects from the ideal home (seventies version) and represented them in such a way that the ghosts of desire were seen and heard, if only from the corner of our eye or at the edge of hearing.