trainer, iPhone packaging, 13 x 6 x 15.5cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
Torsion, Curated by Kyle Weise
9 Dec 2023–27 Jan 2024
Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane
In 1993 I was ten years old and wanted for few things except for a pair of Nike Airs. When my classmate, Stephen, intentionally stabbed the point of his compass through the clear window of his red and white Air Max, I was stricken by the waste. Advertising had shaped my understanding of the world as a sneaker-based hierarchy, so when Stephen’s parents promptly bought him a new pair of Reebok Pumps, I mistook this as a reward. Unable to convince my parents to satiate my consumer needs, I lived in fear of being left out. Of course, my naïve envy is embarrassing upon reflection. While I was hungry for new Nikes, children were being exploited in Nike factories and reports of kids being murdered over sneakers were circulating in America.1
These issues come to mind when I watch Danielle Dean’s works Trainers (2014) and A Portrait of True Red (2016), both curated by Kyle Weise into Torsion at Metro Arts, Meanjin. In each video, women strike dynamic poses against cycloramic backdrops, as if plucked straight from advertisements, but their dialogue has a more contested origin. Built from politician’s platitudes and the voices of political struggle, the scripts are also peppered with Nike marketing copy; slogans of consumption side-by-side with calls for racial, gender and worker liberation. As I watch, it feels strangely fitting for our miasmic political discourse to confuse and conflate these voices.
This tangled feeling of complicity seems key to Weise’s curation. Walking into the exhibition, you might think you have entered a high-end streetwear retailer, given the light-soaked white walls, brightly coloured minimalist prop furniture, exposed services in-ceiling, and large photographic vinyl wall-works, including Keemon Williams’ Eye of the Storm (2023), which implores us to ‘Sprint. The. Marathon.’ The emphatic phrasing, tasteful typesetting, period-accurate grainy stock image and logo all combine to momentarily convince me of its authenticity before I realise it is instead an on-brand parody of Nike’s valorisation of unrealistic goal setting.
courtesy of Metro Arts.
JD Reforma’s vinyl floor print work SSENSE (2023) demonstrates a different kind of confusion; descriptions of his enviable shoe collection have conjured entertainingly twisted images from Photoshop’s nascent generative-AI tools. This is brand awareness expressed as computation. Like ten-year-old-me, Photoshop knows what shoes look like but not what they really are. Fittingly, what emerges from the latent image space is artifice; an abstraction of more salient registers of value. Crossing Reforma’s floor prints brings us to Default Collective’s work Insta ZX II: Loops, Lines, Circles, Dashes. With its crisp white shelves held aloft by stainless tension poles, the work presents as a faux-retail-display featuring the now defunct Amazon Dash — a product made for impulse-ordering other products. Now devoid of any customary and customisable branding, these satisfyingly minimalist plastic pucks eulogise one era of frictionless consumerism while they ape another. A playful proxy for the tangle of ambivalences central to sneaker (and consumer) culture.
Jessica Curry’s Uniquely You (2023) and Come As You Are (2023) present a plush blue-carpeted staircase which I gingerly ascend to come eyes-to-jibbetz with dual acrylic panels adorned with the Crocs charms. Judging by the ‘Please do not touch the artwork’ addendum on the wall, it seems viewers have found these charms’ charm too much to resist. An altar to accessorising, and a testament to the tactility of desire. Effective jibbetz design seems dependant both on endearingly free-wheeling infringement of numerous brand trademarks but also a strategy of cuteness that is also leveraged in David Attwood’s The Making of Indebted Man (2020). Again, I feel a pang of desire and complicity as I gaze at Attwood’s series of baby-sized Nikes displayed proudly on wall-mounted iPhone 4 boxes. Like Curry’s jibbetz, finding such pristine pairings in a gallery (rather than retail) space prompts contemplation. I know it is unnecessary and wasteful, but maybe I should buy authentic Nikes for my infant nephew? The titular friends posing with effortless coolness in Julia Weissenberg’s photograph Friends (2017) seem above internal contradictions. Perhaps their performative self-assuredness comes from knowing the secret to personal branding; you can still look cool as long as no one knows you are wearing knock-offs.
By bringing together these works in one sneaker-centric show, Torsion looks, at first glance, like any of the high-cost retail spaces that have borrowed the white cube gallery aesthetic. But with this subterfuge comes the opportunity for a different kind of transaction, which is exactly what is exciting about the exhibition. It lays bare uncomfortable facets of consumerist desire and, in turn, what shoes can signify, exposing a Gordian knot of social, economic and political realities. A knot not necessarily to be untangled but at least teased.
x 4.5 m. Image courtesy of Metro Arts.
[1] Julia Day, ‘Nike ‘no guarantee on child labour’’, The Guardian, 19 October 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/oct/19/marketingandpr; Rick Telander, ‘Senseless: In America’s cities, kids are killing kids over Sneakers …’, Sports Illustrated, 4 May 1990, https://vault.si.com/vault/1990/05/14/senseless-in-americas-cities-kids-are-killing-kids-over-sneakers-and-other-sports-apparel-favored-by-drug-dealers-whos-to-blame.
