EDGE CITY

Edge City is a focused survey of recent and key works by Elvis Richardson. Richardson examines the built language of settlement and suburbia—its fences, thresholds, materials and protective gestures—drawing attention to the seductive surfaces and underlying tensions embedded within everyday domestic settings. Her works act as pressure points for a companion collection exhibition, foregrounding the suburb as a site of negotiation between control and openness, aspiration and constraint.

Settlement and the Gatekeepers

Settlement and the Gatekeepers

Settlement and the Gatekeepers is a suite of sculptures modifying used domestic gates by removing parts, inserting words and attaching new fixtures. Flattening the gates form a line is drawn to hang flat like paintings on the gallery wall.  

Settlement #2 and #3 are modified exterior gates with the word Settlement incorporated into the gate itself united by the feminine pink blush surface which softens the weight and gravity expressed in the bends and letter forms providing the thinnest of barriers separating surface from substrate.

Exhibited alongside Settlement in Relief a series of unique digital prints, push the barrier affect further by applying a visual illusion of embossing where textures and surfaces of domestic interiors recede and advance to create the image and forensically elicit sensations of touch.

Hot Flush a set of cast bronze plaques of a carved relief profile of Queen Elizabeth II familiar to us all on commonwealth coins yup is it all about money.

Settlement#4 2023 (in the AGNSW collection)

The placing of a gate on Northbourne* Avenue, Canberra’s major road connecting City Hill with the Federal Hwy, the dividing line between the landmark Melbourne and Sydney buildings and their surrounding suburbs, a location as the perfect confluence of forces in which to express the unresolved negotiation of a treaty in Australias founding, establishment and constitution.

The double gate makes obvious how barriers, division and imbalance work, creating differing and assymetrical power, order, space, and access. Where ESTABLISHMENT sits delicately ontop like a handwritten title, a signature, a law it feels fragile. While atop its pair a TREATY flag flys from a familiar flagpole whose arms extend within where an oval shaped hole in the gate infers access, self reflection, engagement and agreement and is a reminder this is not an empty space. Pink Blush powdercoat lends the cover of femininity, playfulness and approachability yet this work seeks to also undermine the patriarchal narratives in play.

Settlement #5 2022

Settlement #8 2022

Generation Rent

Generation Rent 2022, continues my ongoing interest with representations of ‘home’ within political economic and social contexts that are built upon the exclusive, exclusionary legalities of public and private property. 

Generation Rent is a game, letters displayed on an ironwork embelishment can be rearranged to make new words and phrases. Accompanying works Generation Rent Rules and Score Board get the game night started.  It’s a competition and you feel like the loser when you rent in Australia where property owners have more rights and benefits and you’re a human resource.  

The Gate Fanciers

The Gate Fanciers is a series of screen prints on paper reproducing drawings of three gates; the first from the Governor General of Australia’s residence in Canberra, the second Australia Gate at Buckingham Palace London gifted by Australia on the death of Queen Victoria and the third is the entrance gate to Long Bay Goal in Sydney. 

The text adjacent to each drawing is borrowed from actual online marketplace listings selling gates where gate fanciers go to scroll. The text and drawing in combination with the sellers thumbnail image, make visible the persistent narratives of colonisation found in the symbol and function of the gate whether civic or domestic.

The resulting series of prints operate in the satirical traditions of The Onion or Mad Magazine etal presenting the ridiculous impossibility that current structures of power could be reduced to a garage sale, as
a joke.