Steven Rhall
#MariMoments
09.18 – 10.19

MariMoments is a series of five large-scale photographic prints, mounted on three recommissioned light boxes on the Trocadero Arcade Building’s facade, located on the corner of Leeds and Hopkins St in Footscray. The first in a series of activations, MariMoments by Steven Rahll, sets out to challenge established ideas of desire, ownership, and consumerism through a suite of abstracted images and text.

MariMoments is about desire. As an installation, this artwork explores how ‘consumption as desire’ contributes to placemaking, ideas of Self and Other. Merging with a constructed ’Footscray’ landscape, MariMoments spans public, private and civic spaces — strings of text and image creating narratives unique to each encounter — and various histories. Acting singularly, the face of each light-box sits ready for the passing gaze of the public and their immediate consumption.MariMoments also expresses a tenable link between the manipulative dynamics of consumer capitalism and gentrification. Here it argues gentrification’s displacement of marginalized populations the result of White middle–classdesire for civic and personal amenity. Further, MariMoments views the impetus to gentrify integral to both advanced capitalism and its forbear colonialism in their desire for the space of the Other. Steven Rhall, 2018

Steven Rhall is post-conceptual artist operating from his own First Nation, white-passing, cis male, positionality. Rhall’s interdisciplinary practice responds to the intersectionality of First Nation art practice and the Western art canon. He interrogates modes of representation, classification and hierarchy using installation, performance, process lead methodologies, ‘curatorial’ projects, sculpture, and via public & private interventions. Rhall exhibits internationally, lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts, is a PhD candidate at Monash University and lives in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). This project was made possible through the Maribyrnong Arts & Culture Grant.

Aaron Matin (curator)

We acknowledge that we are on traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nations. We offer our respect to the Elders of these traditional lands and, through them, to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.