Curated by Lindy Johnson
Like a jewel encrusted medieval chalice, Wayne Smith's Simple Pleasures is excessive in its symbolic and metonymic statements of power: simulated leather = knowledge/power; studded leather = oppositional force (rockers, punks, neo-pop); the bonded figure = lack of power, sexual fantasy; the grid framing the simulated TV monitors = fortress gates, prevention of access, authority, power, etc. All these connotations in black are graphically opposed to connotations of regression in blue. For example: blue velvet = variegated softness and traditional beauty; simulated blue video images = passivity, regression and at the same time, access and controlled freedom. In a quantitative relationship black is foreground and dominant while blue is background and retiring. The inclusion of smaller black and grey panels between the major panels and the symmetrical arrangement of the whole only exacerbates the imbalance of BLACK AND BLUE. We are left somewhere between caricature and drama. Is the work about the manufacture and consumption of sexual identity constructs? Or is the sexual reference only the major leitmotif and means of access to one's awareness of one's body -the desired object of manipulation by immaterial but active forces? Whatever else Simple Pleasures is concerned with visual seduction.
In John Stafford's The Connotations are Commercial the concept of the body as a political entity is more difficult to eschew than Simple Pleasures. Beside the artist's statement "the body bears the brunt", the transformation of a quote from Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish to verse on five squares of South African black granite syncopates the reference to the body. The poetic effect is enhanced by the lower case type and the considered arrangement of the text on the granite. The variation