Pat Hoffie: ‘Fully Exploited Labour – A Survey Exhibition’
‘Fully Exploited Labour’, the title of Pat Hoffie’s survey exhibition, refers to the artist’s prevailing concern of the last ten years with exposing the exploitation of labour in the Philippines. Hoffie’s method of ‘exploiting’ Filipino billboard painters to execute her art draws attention to the socio-economic inequality that generally falls from notice within global cultural exchange. Authors in the Fully Exploited Labour exhibition catalogue contextualise Hoffie’s art within the impoverished state of the Philippines today and elucidate how her collaboration with billboard painters, such as the Galicia family, attempts to personalise this situation and illuminate life behind the art. Hoffie’s point of impact in her work is how it ‘composes’ cultural disparity. Contested value systems and differing categories of art are brought to bear in the work where modernist constructivism meets Filipino folk art, and mystical icons find company with so-called souvenir art. The mix is an elegant arrangement that disguises the disparity of its elements. Is this the elegant arrangement of globalisation in the era of advanced modernism?
All of the works in the exhibition involve arrangements of elements or objects that overwhelm disparity with elegance. The series of ten double-panelled paintings titled Madame Illuminate Crack’s Pictorial Guide to the Universe 1999 is an example. Each of the paintings involve the pairing of two different panels—one a plain flat colour with a small figure and the title of the work in the centre, and the other panel depicting quasi-mystical scenes derived from tarot cards. Individual titles in the series such as Creation, Seduction, Ambition, Deliberation, suggest a theme of personal destiny. However the titles develop toward a collective Filipino destiny in the sequence of Domination