Justene Williams
Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop

Sydney-based artist Justene Williams has developed a complex practice that takes the tensions inherent in the mediation and reiteration of performance as its point of departure. Williams constructs elaborate sets and costumes consisting of multiple levels of representation that she performs on and in before they are destroyed. The documentation of these actions is then processed visually and sonically for presentation in the gallery space, producing a jarring but utterly compelling collision of performance, installation, photography, video and sound.

Featuring a riotous concoction of battery-powered LED fans spinning eclectic phrases and quotes, cement mixers, umbrellas, magazines and paint, William’s Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop regurgitates the visual language and rhetoric of consumerism, satirising contemporary communication as well as certain aspects of abstract painting. For this work Williams adopts a persona akin to Judge Judy, presiding over a dazzling makeshift environment of revolving circular forms. With a constant turning motion, these echo the circulation of information within society as well as invoking the wheel of chance. Williams over-identifies with the frenzied intensity of our current image-saturated world to comment on the intrinsic nature and consequences of mediation for our contemporary lives.