OBSCENE

'Obscene' by Paul Yore

OBSCENE brings together over two years of textile works by Melbourne born artist Paul Yore, in his Adelaide debut. Ranging from intimate textual needlepoints to wall-sized collaged appliqué works, Yore excavates deep into the bedrock of our neurotic globalised civilisation, questioning the foundational myths of Western culture and the slippery position language plays in structuring our perception of selfhood, time, reality, and sense of place in history. Yore draws on the traditions of classical Greek art, decorative Flemish and French tapestries, trashy pop-culture, gay porn, cartoons, psychedelia, and the frenzied excesses of rococo style to build up immersive portals abounding in deconstructive linguistic riddle and iconoclastic patchworks of unabashed animalistic carnality.

On the surface, layers of hand-sewn beads, buttons and sequins exude a sense of queer frivolity. But this glitzy skin belies darkness beneath the surface, where themes of colonial brutality, debased capitalistic vice, and the collapse of the symbolic order mingle with images of homoerotic fantasy in some kind of grandiose psychosexual melodrama.