Yellow Monster, a solo exhibition by Alister Karl
Closing night celebration 26th September, 6 to 8pm.
Running 11th to 27th September 2009
Playing with ideas of monuments and ruins, Alister Karl invokes the ghosts of past childhood memories, creating an installation out of Tonka trucks toys. The work has a dark undercurrent as the trucks take on the role of ruin, stacked haphazardly in the corner, discarded. Suggesting a long forgotten time and place that we admire from a distance.
Each truck carries a story with it, where it’s been, what it once meant to some body, the neglect that it has suffered. By piling the trucks, the individual voices are drowned out and buried. When the trucks become animated they regain their voice but they seem alone, trying to relive old times and glory days. The ghost of the child who had loved them, hovering over the proceedings. The adult who looks back at his or her childhood toys with fondness in the same way that a large civilisation looks back at the ruins of the past.
Karl choses a very masculine symbol when he uses the Tonka truck to illustrate this ‘universal history’. The Tonka truck is often symbolic of a boy’s (and sometimes a girl’s) desire to grow up and become a man. These toys are a symbol of the child looking forward to Adulthood. In Yellow Monster, Alister turns them around so the adult looks back at their child self - peering at each other over the gulf of time that will always separate them.
Alister Karl is a practising artist for more then thirteen years. Working in a range of media and disciplines Alister creates immersive installations and environments for the viewer to experience. Always with a sense of humour, Alister explores the experience of memory and false longing.
This sense of humour is never more present then it is in Karl’s artist statement, in which he creates an almost dream like sense of the child that he looks to.
“Tonka trucks litter Alister’s home, mostly yellow ones with a few red ones and some very small ones. He brings them to life in ways that he could not quite do when smaller then he currently is. He dreams that one day there will be enough toy trucks in his home that they could reach the ceiling if piled in the right way.
Teetering and tottering ready to fall.”(1)
As Walter Benjamin discussed in “The Image of Proust,” superseded objects, things that have become part of a previous era carry a special aura or significance. “In his view, these objects could be harnessed to convey a profane illumination of the present (2).” Alister takes this concept and applies it to an individual’s consciousness rather then a collectives. A toy truck will always be current as long as there are children within a collective. The same toy truck becomes outmoded relatively quickly in the individuals life. But can that little yellow truck, when looked back on, some how illuminate the adult in some way?
(1)Karl, Alister, ‘Yellow Monster’, artist statement, Brunswick Arts Space, Melbourne, 2009
(2) Kunda, Maria, ‘Essay’, Sally Smart: Shadow Farm, exhibition catalogue, Bendigo Art Gallery, 2001, pp.5.
Yellow Monster will run from the 11th to the 27th September 2009 at Brunswickarts Space with a closing night celebration on Friday the 26th of September from 6 to 8pm.
Brunswickarts Space 2a Little Breese Street Brunswick, VIC 3056
