HyperUpcycling

Hundred Years Gallery is proud to present the first UK solo show by London based Australian artist Ben Coiacetto.

‘HyperUpcycling’ is a multidisciplinary body of work comprising film, painting and sculpture that critique the theatre of public media, and, more broadly, our exposure to advertising, and corporate control of our environment. The works inhabit a space where their epistemology has been rewritten by corporate interest. No space is our own, no place unobserved, un-regulated or un-recorded. Drawing references and modes of practice from the media he critiques Coiacetto distorts and reanimates media symbols to emphasize the absurd contradictions and attitudes he sees being promulgated and becoming the habitual fodder of our daily lives. Coiacetto’s aesthetic merges the slickness of product advertisements with the quality of 1970s cinematography and the ethereal quality of romanticist oil painting to create humorous, but unsettling environments.

Love Tax, a film combining animated sculpture and live action, stages an exchange between a chief executive and a meditating ‘by sitter’. Riding a shrunken HSBC building floated by a lifebuoy downstream the chief exec halts his vessel beside an inflatable council flat intrigued by the occupant meditating on a ‘General Obsolescence’ washing machine who is delivering a cliché laden poem about love. Observing the situation the executive proposes a ‘Love Tax Form’ that seeks to calculate the amount of love an individual receives and then tax them accordingly.

Nearby, in Trauma Relief Token we peer through plastic magnifying sheets into the same set of sculptures that form the backdrop of Love Tax, acting like a primitive Google Earth, we zoom in on distorted aerial photographs of the Thames and the corroded objects that Coiacetto has collected from its riverbank from which the sculptures are constructed. It evokes an eerie déjà vu and a sense that time and space are elastic. Here thoughts on the totality of surveillance, capitalism and state control are ‘upcycled’ and installed as absurdist dystopian drama.

The paintings parody the existential anguish rife in modern art vanitas. On the floor, erected in the painting’s foreground are post-internet tombstones and ‘Ebayist totems’ made of fake grass and chopped up lenticular prints of religious scenes emerging from small piles of real bones found along The Thames. How do you stop capital killing the new proletarians is a wheelable painting on perspex that apes a video game POV, playing itself out with political characters, contrived and creating emotional distance. The same hardhat that appears in the painting is suspended at head height from the ceiling expecting the viewer to wear it and break their passive observation. George Osborne becomes a hairdryer blowing pound notes around a school blackboard and a pile of satirical promotional flyers advertising a Post-Hummus Siamese Cat-Chair that resurrects your inner child by licking hummus from your crotch and meowing incantations lie beneath a suicidal lifebuoy.

This visual cacophony is unnerving in its mimesis of today’s consumptive visual culture. Laced with narratives and arranged with an intentional lack of hierarchy in an act of deliberate chaos, the dialogue between Coiacetto's work and the audience can be challenging, even frustrating and confusing but, this is where Coiacetto feels the individual must place themself: wrestling with and engaging in the swathes of advertising and propaganda with which we are faced daily. To do so, he argues, is to reject detachment and reclaim ourselves. From this new vista, one is able to perceive the illusion of sense and the delusion of newness, to recognise the limits of rationality in the age of information overlaid and to embrace instead, a messier, human response.