David Wadelton, Contemporary Art, Tolarno Galleries, Yarra River, Real Estate, Melbourne, 2011
Summary
Melbourne-based photographer and surrealist painter David Wadelton has found a rich vein for his artistic explorations in cultural consumption. For him, pop cultural forms – from film to comics, advertising to celebrity, and anything in between – are all grist for the mill, all legitimate sources for appropriation and reinterpretation. One such source is the hyperbolic world of marketing, which Wadelton exploited in his 2011 exhibition entitled ‘Open for Inspection’, for which he photographed billboards, advertising and the like focused on the property market.
Wadelton gives his already fetishised subject a gloss that pushes his works decisively into the hyperreal. This is evident in the richly coloured ink-jet pigment print ‘SOLD #3’, which was shown in ‘Open for Inspection’. The tightly framed photograph reveals just a sliver of window frame, directing the viewer’s focus to the advertising signage plastered across the Melbourne cityscape, underscoring the commercial obsession with property development and speculation. This contemporary preoccupation with the commodification of space is literally writ large in the artwork, expressed through the hyperbole of modern marketing, which renders the urban fabric a semiotic surface.
