Poster Boy
Claudia Chan Shaw
This event has concluded
Dates:
Entry Fee:
Free
Exhibition Event:
Official Opening
14/05/2016 2:30 pm
Artist Talk
21/05/2016 4:30 am
Every day a poster is pasted to a wall. It has a limited amount of time to attract attention and convey its message before someone else’s message is plastered on top. The second message fights for exposure until it suffers the same fate, when anonymous hands come along and strip the posters away, leaving only a suggestion of what might have been. It is what is left, that accidental abstract abbreviation and the patterns they create, that fascinates Claudia Chan Shaw.
Claudia has been photographing street scenes for many years. Her exhibition “Poster Boy” explores this process of accidental layering and the stripping away of messages. Some of the resulting photographs are purely abstract, while others offer suggestions of a message. The viewer is left to fill in the blanks. Torn edges of paper divide blocks of colour and typography. The photographs capture a moment in time, a graphic ballet with constantly changing contexts.
The “Poster Boy” series has been photographed in the streets of Paris, Barcelona, Sydney and Melbourne. Claudia travels everywhere with her camera, recording the ever changing street scene. She revisits favourite walls and is constantly watching, waiting for the disintegration of the posters. New posters appear in the middle of the night and cover the old messages, and the defaced wall is gone forever. She has to be quick to capture that fleeting moment.
The final images are printed poster size, reverting to the look of street posters themselves. Claudia is fascinated by the transitory nature of the urban environment. While the resulting photographs appear spontaneous and random, the framing of each image is no accident. Each is curated in camera.
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