Curated by Susan Charlton
The exhibition Elvis Sightings, curated by Susan Charlton , was part of the Elvis Expo week organised by Brent Clough and Mathew Leonard. They run an excellent program on popular culture on ABC Radio National called "In the Mix" (Mondays at 10.05 am and 8.05pm). The exhibition thus occurred in the context of a multimedia Elvis event, including radio pro grams, live performance, a symposium and a memorabilia show.
In a sense the whole Elvis Expo was a work of art that took as its medium the media itself. Elvis was a suitable image to choose for such a project. As Greil Marcus shows in his book Dead Elvis, the King remains King because he was a far more complex and multifaceted image than is often imagined. Bits of the Elvis iconography end up combined and transformed with other signs, so that he proliferates across the information landscape. "He was not even, or at least, only a singer, or an artist. He was that perfect American symbol, fundamentally a mystery."1
The artists marshalled for Elvis Sightings were not called upon to explain the mystery once and for all. Elvis is simply too big for art to master and explain. Rather, they explored some idiosyncratic and sometimes rather personal connections and permutations from the vast repertoire of possible incarnations of the King. "Eivis is alive and well and living in a place called Heartbreak Hotel" according to Mary Temelovski, who provides album covers for the records Elvis never got around to making. She draws attention to the square album cover format as a neglected genre of modern art and to the need to keep manufacturing permutations of the album of Elvis