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Julie Shiels has pursued a socially engaged art practice for almost three decades. In recent years, she has turned her critical attention to the politics of public space, and specifically to the gentrification of the inner Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.
Shiels’s exhibition, ‘Sleeper’, explores the phenomenon of abandoned mattresses in public spaces; a familiar sight in St Kilda, a suburb long known for its itinerate community of underprivileged people. Found mattresses inform Shiels’s work in two ways: they contribute material and ideas for the creation of new studio work, and serve as the principal site for the staging of ephemeral public space interventions, the documentation of which is presented in ‘Sleeper’ as a series of photographs.
Throughout her exhibition Shiels rails against the validation of ‘beauty and utility’ as an ‘ideological alibi for development’.1 She appropriates abandoned mattresses for her art because these objects symbolise an unwittingly subversive spurning of development imperatives by the disenfranchised.
In her series ‘Quoting’, Shiels presents photographic documentation of quotes she has stencilled in situ on to abandoned mattresses or cardboard boxes. At a glace, these photographs suggest an agitprop campaign against gentrification and a critique of bourgeois taste and consumer excess. Despite resembling politically-inspired graffiti, Shiels’s gently provocative signs are essentially ambiguous, not didactic, and provoke contemplation rather than political action. For example, one mattress is stencilled with Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, ‘Less is More’; a quote that could equally serve as a stoic mantra for the disenfranchised or as a reference to property location surpassing building size as a marker of social status.
‘Sleeper’s’ centrepiece is a wall of photographs entitled, Sleeping with Knives. This installation exploits