Allegory of Opposition

Background:
The body of creative works research relations between politics and celebrity focusing on histories of caricature; see Gatrell (2006), City of Laughter, Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. Researches how commentary on politics may be enacted within an expanded field of drawing investigating the uses of political faces within a framework of 'faciality' outlined by Welchman in Face(t)s: Notes on Faciality (1988) and concepts of the portrait's 'dispersal' theorised by Ernst Van Alphen in Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thoughts (2005) and developed in the works of Leon Golub, Portraits of Power (1976). How can graphical satire operate at a local audience level?
Contribution:
Allegory of Opposition' installs pairs of large body-scale drawn heads of politicians and sports figures - related by stencilled water-colour texts that form an interleaved dialogue of speech-bubbles. Pictorial unity of the 'portrait' heads, public-figure is undermined and opened-up by the imaged spoken texts. Work challenge the acceptance of image of political idenityt. The research suggest tropes of political cartooning establish .poltical critique through a process of self-identification between the political body, the viewer and the graphic image of celebrity.
Significance:
The research was commissioned for the 2012 Basil Sellers Sport and Art Prize auspiced by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. 14 Finalists were selected from a national selection process. Catalogue states the prize has a 'national profile as an important survey of Australian contemporary art'. Artists include John Campbell, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Sangeeta Sandrasegar and Christian Thompson.