14 October - 7 November 2020
In her latest body of work, Loribelle Spirovski explores our current societal condition through the lens of ‘Post-Internet art’, an artistic mode of thinking stemming from the early 2000s with the advent of the World Wide Web. A convoluted and often-debated term, ‘Post-Internet art’ has shifted and changed in its meaning throughout the decades, as the digital has become an ephemeral entity. Born during the chaos of a global pandemic, ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy’ speaks to the digital-dependence enforced upon society; from our social connections to our professional lives, the distinction between online and offline has become increasingly blurred. Certainly, it is not without comedic irony that ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy’ can only be viewed by audiences on their computer screens at home.
It is therefore with a fitting dose of nostalgia that Loribelle takes us back to a younger, more innocent era of the Internet, reigned by over-stretched images, the shadows and gradients of WordArt, and the distinctive scribbles of Microsoft Paint. With their vibrant colours, holographic texts, anamorphic figures, and dispassionate Deities; Loribelle’s Post-Internet paintings are a time capsule of emotion. With phrases such as ‘Ennui’ ‘Entropy’ ‘Determinism’ and ‘Mea Culpa’ broadcast across her canvases, Loribelle captures the internalised dialogue of the masses, one overrun with listlessness and boredom, uncertainty and disorder, existentialism and regret.
“When I began this series, I was in a funny state of mind; mad at the world; full of a desire to vandalise....I wanted to capture the energy of my teenage self, making collages in the stifling fibro bedroom of my parents’ house. Cutting from stolen copies of my father’s National Geographic magazines and caring very little about mutilating photographs of my child self”.
– Loribelle Spirovski
Similarly, Loribelle describes the newest additions to her ‘Homme’ series as having developed out of a “need to play and experiment, using found faces on the internet which led to made-up faces and gender-bending” ultimately creating subjects that are at once familiar, yet entirely imagined. Pairing bold brushstrokes and jumpy crayon-esque lines with vibrantly coloured backgrounds, Loribelle continues her playful ode to the early 2000s. Undoubtedly, in a period fraught with anxiety and uncertainty, ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy’ offers viewers the opportunity to return to a simpler, more innocent time.
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Artist statement:
Until all that remains
becomes fire
and earth
under neon skies
Bodies of work grow from the ones that precede them, incubated in an atmosphere that the artist cannot help but be witness to. Earlier this year, cooped at home, I examined how the crisis of the world caused my mind to retreat into the memory palace of childhood - my own, in dank Manila streets.
Upon starting this particular body of work, I found myself along with the rest of the world, months deep into a slow-burning apocalypse, of the kind that I'd been primed for by countless films from childhood. So much rage and outrage brought me back to my own adolescent emigration to Australia. Adolescence, fuelled by the rage of leaving childhood, having to start again as seedlings, fighting for growth and light. All the while, the world was undergoing its own kind of adolescence, preparing for the coming maturity of a new millennium.
The 'Post-Internet Painting' series, like the 'Homme' series, grew out of a response to an existence increasingly shaped by the Internet and social media. Having lived through the birth of the Internet, this series muses on the innocent beginnings of the computer generation, defined by fond memories of Word Art and MS Paint.
This new body of work strips back the architectural forms that I've been exploring in the past couple of years, replacing highly defined spaces with childlike scrawls of arches vaguely reminiscent of de Chirico's arched laneways. In these spaces, statues distend and streams of paint become active characters, balletic in their freewheeling dance across the canvas.
As I worked on this series, an ironic phrase kept cropping up in my mind. It was short, tautological and incessantly familiar. When I finally caved in and graffitied it onto the canvas, a quick online search brought me to its origin: 'Happy, happy, joy, joy' was a song from the 90's cartoon, 'Ren & Stimpy' - something that I never actually watched as a kid, because we couldn't afford cable TV, yet somehow still in my subconscious after all these years. The phrase for me sums up a lot of how I feel about this year. The repetitiveness of our days indoors, the incessant presence of social media, the irony of words like 'happy' and 'joy' during moments when they are absent, or even when, guiltily, we begin to feel them again."
- Loribelle Spirovski
