Jack Frawley

27 October - 5 December      Pandemic    

More on the artist

Jack Frawley’s work Pandemic is on the money.  It fortuitously marks the resumption of SLOT’s exhibition program, which was suspended in response to the recent Covid lock down. Jack’s work was devised as a satire of “buzzwords”, invented to describe the paralysing catastrophe that is Covid-19. Words that have become clichés in our over popularised mass media. By identifying these “catch phrases” with jockeys’ racing silks on the eve of Melbourne Cup, the race, as the cliché has it, that ‘stops a nation’; Jack has poetically observed our Prime Minister’s much parodied assertion that Covid-19 vaccination is not a race.

It is probably cynical to wonder at our exiting lockdown just in time for the Spring Racing Carnival. Or, that international travel will recommence immediately prior to Christmas. But it isn’t cynical to identify our media’s normalisation of confronting situations by over familiarising us with the words, expressions and images used to describe them. They are rendered as clichés where meaning is leached through overuse, leaving us with only an appreciation of the expression's articulation as its content. This is the essence of news as entertainment.

The behemoth of our materialist culture rolled on throughout lockdown. We ate, drank and net-flixed our way through it. Now we are being coaxed from isolation and back into a “robust” consumerism, not through an eradication of the virus, not by the sudden and jubilant partying portrayed on television, but through an easy acceptance of what was once portrayed as perilous. This is the work of clichés, those so artfully identified by Jack Fawley that permit us to face the future of the pandemic “armed” only with a vaccine, the so called “jab”. 

Tony Twigg