Pilfered Pillar
In response to Visaya Hoffie’s Window Gallery exhibition earlier this year, we’re delighted to share Adam Ford’s reflection on Visaya’s work:
Nestled in the Outer Space gallery window stands Visaya Hoffie’s exalting sculptural installation Pilfered Pillar 2023. The small not-for-profit organisation sits in the heart of Meanjin/Brisbane’ Fortitude Valley on bustling Brunswick Street, offering passersby a curious glimpse into the city’s contemporary art scene. In this work, the titular ‘pillar’ is a central column that can be said to suggest something of classical orders (say, Doric, Ionic, or Composite) but which instead takes the wreckages of civilisations long fallen as its structural point of corruption. Fashioned from discarded and stained cushioning mattress foam and grafted together with disorderly sutures, this pillar erects and perhaps even memorialises enduring notions of memory, media, and manipulation.
The latent materiality of the mattress foam invokes a portal into the dream world where the online and everyday worlds collapse into each other. In the soft core of the central pillar the artist threads a string of tiny lights. A facial outline of Walt Disney’s Goofy furiously peers outward, whilst below the words ‘ChatGPT,’ runs cursively. At night this optical stitching alights the gallery window in a luminous blue glow. Beneath the pillar, scattered objects and images spill out haphazardly. Internet imagery floats alongside arbitrary detritus, where cracks and crevices form in the slippages between the digital and physical. Hoffie mediates a vacillating sense of placement with which the ephemera pour forth. Perhaps these mementos gesture something placatory, as if left at the foot of an obelisk or shrine. Or perhaps they lie in ruin like rubble, evidencing something that a former past has dislodged for a disrupted future. Either way, these objects and images offer clues that seem half-remembered or half-forgotten—like outworn memes or yesterday’s vanguard gone awry.
In this work, the artist continues her ongoing interest in how social media saturates our lives, captures not only our thoughts but attention, and alters, if not mutates, the way we see the world. Scattered across the installation are remnants of her previous forays into iconography that are here recontextualised so that they appear broken, damaged, and distorted. A black cow hide cut that recalls the Scream franchise’s Ghostface is tacked casually amongst a ceramic cast of characters, a hand-knitted teddy bear, and a paralysis tick, all familiar to Hoffie’s practice, and those who keenly follow it. These artefacts take on both representational and symbolic meaning in the artist’s visual orbit, and here form concert with printouts of social media icons including Anna Paul, Tokyo Toni, Fousey, Tana Mongeau, and the Island Boys. A ‘yassified’ rendering of Donald Trump’s mugshot further serves to mediate the tensions between reality and the online, and the liminal space engendered between fact and fiction, the digital and the analogue, image and imagination.
In an accompanying podcast, Hoffie cites artist and writer, Hito Steyerl, whose interest in “the poor image” offers inspiration for her own commentary on contemporary life.1 Steyerl writes about “the stolen, cropped, edited and re-appropriated” imagery that is “bought, sold, leased … manipulated and adulated.”2 This conforms entirely to the artistic license with which Hoffie has reiterated the dejected status of images and objects. Take the printouts of the social media stars whose crinkle-crafted alfoil frames catch the glints of lights from the traffic outside the gallery, or the refractory flashes of iPhone cameras, so that they glimmer like tinhorn religious icons. Rather than expensive gilding or goldleaf, the artist has relied on repurposed everyday media to lean fully into the minutiae of everyday life, as if such life were but a mundane precursor to this millennia’s highly elaborate and digitally constructed zeitgeist.
1 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, no.10 (November 2009): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
2 Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux Journal, no.15 (April 2010): http://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/
Visaya Hoffie, Pilfered Pillar (2023), Outer Space Window Gallery. Documentation by Louis Lim.
Visaya Hoffie, Pilfered Pillar (2023), Outer Space Window Gallery. Documentation by Louis Lim.
Visaya Hoffie, Pilfered Pillar (2023), Outer Space Window Gallery. Documentation by Louis Lim.
Across the installation, a potent technological impulse undulates in full purview of its dated past. A rotating hubcap and a pulsating fake terrarium crank out their wobbly circuits, suggesting the grinding down of outdated technology. The cheap flashing lights that spell out ‘ChatGPT’ observes the ever-encroaching sphere of artificial intelligence in a precognitive act of commemoration. That a ‘pile of scraps’ surrounds the column continues to exert an association with an archaeological site. Excavated from this site are the ‘clues’ about what we value in contemporary. Each clue possesses its own dirty little secret; they provide the background for how we might come to see ourselves, and more strategically, each other. Yet the evidence of this surrounding rubble is contradictory. Hand-made paraphernalia fall amongst reproductions plucked from the ambivalent depths of the online world where they are neither prioritised nor preferentially treated. It’s as if Hoffie laments on the love lost for the hand-made—the very craft that has historically typified our humanness. However, even in the face of artificial intelligence and the rising tide of technological immersion, the power of materials and the touch and connection they afford are not entirely lost.
The chaotic nature of the installation is a deliberate ploy in Hoffie’s critical evaluations of contemporary culture. Our current climate is one of laissez-faire individualism, where anything goes, in any direction, at any given time, all the time, all at once. It stands to reason that our art might also do the same. Whilst the work might shrug with a maximalist, and at times grungy DIY aesthetic, its infectious irreverence for the past and its contemplation of a present in purview of a gurgling future disrupts any nihilistic associations. All is never lost. Instead, the artist approaches her art making like she does her wider interactions of contemporary society: critically, sometimes cautiously, but never without her personal brand of humour to parry the blows of all that is unsettling, beautiful, imagined and everything in between.
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Words by Adam Ford (Nyoongar), Assistant Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.