Philip Brophy
Philip Brophy | Australia b.1959 | 10 Flaming youths (production still) 2010 | © Courtesy the artist
Philip Brophy’s work is often concerned with transitional states, making links between the tangible and the intangible, the intellectual and the visceral. He is interested in the elements we don’t see but feel intensely, the dynamic relationships between things that generate our emotional and sensory responses rather than simply what we see before us. Invisible yet powerful human drives, sensibilities and sensations – as well as sound, editing and spatiality – are given the same presence and emphasis in his work as images and physical forms.
Philip Brophy’s 10 Flaming youths 2010 features portraits of ten young people undergoing a kind of metamorphosis: generating a flickering aura of fire as they near the front of the screen, before fading away again. Fire is a transforming and purifying agent, offering renewal as well as destruction, yet these adolescents seem to emerge from their experience unchanged. Brophy sourced the faces from those of models on youth marketing websites, translating them into drawings and then vector images for digital animation. Collapsing together art, design and consumer culture, Brophy’s work uses an aesthetic that, as he says:
. . . employs Pop effects to iconise the individual portraits . . . No action or even desire is suggested by their faces; indeed, their ‘emptiness’ is exactly what youth marketers/branders would like most youth to be.
The vacuous beauty of the youths offers us a blank screen onto which we can project our own desires, which are as transitory and fleeting as youth itself – and can so easily go up in flames.
2010 artists | Philip Brophy | Nigel Helyer | Chris Howlett |Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine | Wade Marynowsky | Soda_Jerk | Lynette Wallworth
