Shiny Happy People,
featured at the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, is a sculptural
installation by Victoria-based American artist Carley Smith. Shiny Happy
People is composed of recycled non-precious materials, proposing a
challenge to what is considered precious, beautiful, and enjoyable.
Playful and colourful, the work crosses between installation and
object-based pieces that gain personalities and tendencies of their own.
Often succumbing to gravity and wind currents, the environment and the
materials evolve over the course of the
exhibition. Change is welcomed – subtle or sudden – reflecting the
pieces back into their previous material states of garbage, decay, and
dysfunction. Nothing is permanent, and nothing is immune to change. As
the materials undergo change, they act as metaphors for humans and the
constructed society we live in, one in which people and their material
things are veiled in a manicured, glitzy disguise until deemed obsolete.
If art can change or deteriorate naturally and still retain its beauty,
why can’t people and their objects? Are we denying a completely
natural and unavoidable fact, and who truly are the Shiny Happy People?
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