SceneHepworth_03, SceneHepworth_04, SceneHepworth_05, SceneHepworth_06, SceneHepworth_07            (ongoing series)
2015-2016

Urethane, foam, hair extensions, athletic cord & toggles, foam.
each 180cm x 85cm x 20cm   2015-2016

SceneHepworth is an amalgamation of “Barbara Hepworth” and “Scene Kid”. Hepworth’s sculptures exemplify an “agreeable” kind of Modernism: rounded, evocative, ambiguous. Hepworth created a proto-meme, ubiquitous sculptural “brand” long before we began to talk about the output of “creatives” in this way. Picture the decorative objects in entry ways of mid-level furniture showrooms. Think of the rounded forms littering backgrounds of “Cultured Bourgeoisie Office/Condo” scenes in cartoons, television, movies. “Hepworths” are everywhere. The smooth, stone “anyone” face is a “pareidolia”—a vague stimulus perceived as significant and clear. “Hepworths” are classically now, effortlessly (M)modern.

Each mask is titled in sequence after completion, mimicking a common method of naming grouped image files on a computer. This series of masks merges Hepworth-like forms with hairstyles taken from Scene Kids, a dead youth culture formed on the social-networking site MySpace. Teenagers combined visual signifiers from former subcultures, variations of the same multi-colored, hair-extension augmented hairstyle, to create bobble headed faces with the same locks captured on innumerable selfies still drifting around the Internet. Hepworth’s face-like stone meets cheap extensions, a timeless proto-meme and a dated online-scene: both heavily affected by repetition, their brand, their meme-status.

>>> Installation documentation from Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens, curated by Ashlee Conery @ Pi Artworks, London (UK)

>>> Also shown @ A Space, Toronto (CA)