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The pieces, from six Brisbane artists, are placed around the gallery, creeping onto the floor like enigmatic statements, teasing the viewer with their conceptual significance. Certainly there is evidence here but of what? The curator, Michele Helmrich, in her catalogue essay refers to the Salle de Reconnaissance as a room where the dead body is laid out for identification: and so we enter the house of clues.
Hiram To's cloth chessboard lies on the floor and tempts the chess player to sit cross-legged before it, to play out an imaginary game. And this is what Hiram To 's work is all about, a game played with glossy, seductive advertisements for designer clothes with their chic foreign labels. We read 'Le Shirt'not 'La Chemise ': parlez vous franglais? it's all so chic and clever. The French adverts incorporate a touch of English, the English adds a stylish word or two of French subtly patronizing their cosmopolitan audience (who probably speak not a word of the foreign language). But we're not discussing an advertisement we're looking at works of art. We're looking at Method Acting. In his exhibition statement To quotes from a quote:
"Art is so close to the mechanisms of advertising that a lot of people still need to realise that advertising is an art...''
Hiram To paints an advert taken from a magazine such as The Face then re-photographs the end result and frames it as if it were now a work of High Art. Thus the mass-produced image is elevated from its magazine origins to the single gallery image.
The chessboard begins the game with its squares of black and white, the combination of which forms the photographic