air kiss
The party's over. Only a soft afterglow lingers on, a detumescence of sorts, still warm and pulsing ever so gently in the wee, small crepuscular hours. it's time to leave, but you want to stay-floating on this strange and wonderful night, now dissolved in the melancholy haze of blue and red party lights. You doze off, rousing to only a fuzzy, mauve residue of the night before. Someone must have left the lights on.
I tried to imagine what kind of occasion Steven Carson envisaged for Air Kiss, an installation of one hundred party lights. Surely not a (blue light} disco or fevered dance party; no evidence of gay abandon was to be found here. Nor did those coloured globes recall the reassuring fairy lights of Christmas, with their twinkling and twee goodwill. The choice of this particular 'Festoon Light System', instead suggested traces of something simpler and quiet, like a sad party where no one turned up or a family party, a barbeque, perhaps. An altogether different era, the late '50s to '60s was evoked, a time when party lights were so special that only 'other' families had them, nailed to their verandahs in straight lines or kept pristine in storage boxes-waiting for a special occasion, like the obligatory Engagement or Fiftieth. Beyond the domain of domestic celebration, these lights also signified sin and sideshows, tawdriness and vulgar entertainment. Australia was innocent then, very Angle and not terribly good at glamour or hedonism.
The dim glow of pathos generated by Air Kiss's DIY lighting, echoed a brave attempt at 'gaiety' within an older culture of restraint, at least in terms of mood and materiel. Firmly located in last century's