Hello Sunshine was mixed media installation work that I exhibited at Gold Coast City Gallery from October 23 – December 6 2015. Virginia Rigney, who was the Gallery Curator at the time, kindly wrote this essay about the exhibition, shared below.
An essay by Virginia Rigney on Hello Sunshine
The first presentation of this installation, Hello Sunshine by Claudio Kirac is conceived to be shown alongside a set of black and white photographic images of an intense period of demolitions that took place in Surfers Paradise during the first high rise construction boom in the mid to late 1970’s. Those pictures were conceived as a social documentary project by Toowoomba based amateur photographer Graham Burstow, who had been coming to the Gold Coast on holiday as a child since the late 1920s and who saw the significance of that transformation.
Seen together, they magnify what is an indelible irony of the Gold Coast – that it is a city whose greatest continuity is change.
The visual aesthetic of a black and white photograph inevitably renders the past as a single crisp frozen moment, however Kirac has chosen to go beyond this type of representation to layer image within image; still and moving, public and personal, the past within the present. His process reveals a contemporary archeology, responding to a place where the residue of once familiar past structures is erased so quickly, and effectively reclaims a richer perspective on what might be seen as an otherwise unremarkable landscape of carparks.
For the subject of this place is Pacific Fair – Pac Fair as it is known locally; a place about the same age as the artist and one that he has grown up alongside. Drawing openly from the trend in West Coast American mall design of partially open ‘streetscape’, Pacific Fair opened in 1977 and developed over the following decades alongside the burgeoning towers of Broadbeach. It was a local retail precinct as well as a national tourist attraction. Entertainment, a ‘train’ with a merry toot that drove you around, an adventure playground and water features gave an injection of Gold Coast allure to what were otherwise conventional high street supermarkets and discount stores. These were also the everyday retail experience for residents like Kirac, who belongs to now generations of local teenagers who have met and congregated there. As a skateboarder he also keenly explored the potential of the carparks, kerbs and ramps, filming these moments in 1996 on Video8. Flickers of those times now appear dimly in the dark within this work, and from the pre smart phone device era, rare personal images of a teenager simply hanging out.
While many of the malls that inspired Pacific Fair are now failing in America, this Gold Coast property is currently undergoing a multi-million dollar transformation and it will once again aim to be a major attraction within the city.
Kirac has documented what was a very rapid demolition and construction period that took place over 2014-15 and in the length of a perfect pop song, reimagines a concrete arcadia.
