Pat Hoffie's recent installation, Fully Exploited Labour, at the Queensland Art Gallery, is the artist 's considered critique of the power at work in various kinds of cultural exploitations, demonstrating the misreadings that occur at the time of cross-national transactions. For some time explorations of the fit and misfit of intercultural experiences have been a theme of Hoffie's work, as demonstrated by her recent retrospective show, held at the Brisbane City Gallery.
In Fully Exploited Labour, a trilogy of theatricalised portraits of the artist, each between seven and nine metres high, accompanies photo-documentation of the processes involved in making the colossal images. In a serious attempt to address, amongst other things, the issue of the exploitation of women artists within the history of art, these portraits of a curiously Filipino-like Hoffie are mapped onto enlarged, and highly disproportionate, versions of three popular Australian works of and by women in the Queensland Art Gallery—Vida Lahey's Monday Morning (1912), A.M.E. Bale's Leisure Moments (1902) and Hilda Rix-Nicholas' The Fair Musterer (1935). The three canvases were painted from photographs, under Hoffie's direction, by the Galicia family—painters of garish cinema billboards—in the Philippines. An explanatory Cross-Cultural Primer (printed on cardboard to replicate a school exercise book), presents the artist's rationale for the project.
The intention of the exercise is one of deliberate mistranslation. The installation seeks to overload the viewer with an extreme example of the exploitations it aims to criticise. Its deliberate extraversion is a conscious stance. The Primer tells us that Hoffie's faces signal an attack against cultural and economic insensitivities to the lives and circumstances of the Filipino people. Theoretically this might be considered a reasonable argument. Yet, in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline