Eye Witness Frenzy: Rich and Fabulous

Artist’s Deej Fabyc and Elvis Richardson exhibition’s feed off, and into, each other’s in the collaborative project RICH AND FABULOUS. Richardson’s (an Australian artist currently based in New York) work Slide Show Land is a collection of collections of over 30,000 family and travel slides from hundreds of different families dating from 1940 - 1995 , advertised and purchased through various Internet sites. The geography of collected images spans Cape Cod, Paris, South Africa, a vast global spread of other people’s adventures. So generic they are familiar, through this work we enter unfamiliar lives even if they do not seem to be so different from ours.

A more intimate, if still anonymous, glimpse into the private lives of others is shown in Deej Fabyc’s (an Australian/UK artist) video work KJ’s Story. A compilation of family photographs from a woman known to us only as KJ, who sings a poignant kareoke soundtrack (REM’s Everybody Hurts) over the top, this work serves to activate the images in Slide Show Land, through the tender.subjectivity of this memorabilia. Alongside this work is I Am Me You Are You, a collaborative piece with Fabyc’s daughter, where cardboard box beds hold a collection of small dolls, tucked up for sleep, each one lit by the soft glow of an individual night-light. With an accompanying video of her daughter Beata Jean Lockheart, reciting I Am Me You Are You over and over, this work contemplates the process of developing subjectivity, or becoming an individual self.

Reviews, Essays & Articles
Social Rites Study
The Press, May 30, 2002, p 32
Pauli, Dorothee 
Mark Harvey, Deej Fabyc, Elvis Richardson.

RICH AND FABULOUS : Deej Fabyc & Elvis Richardson
The Physics Room Annual, 2002
Forde, Rosemary