The Thousands

Julia Robinson and Sera Waters share a tendency to the kind of finely crafted work that beguiles audiences with mesmeric beauty. For example, this year at Format Festival Sera Waters installed giant drips of blood all over the building. That doesn’t sound beautiful at all. Except they were constructed entirely of sparkly red sequins. So it was beautiful. Julia Robinson is prone to the same kind of contradiction. Her 2006 work, Morbid Growths, included a series of disfigured goat-creatures awkwardly transplanted onto human body parts. Sounds disturbing. But I was so soothed by the lovely floral materials they were constructed from that I wasn’t disturbed at all. In fact they were kind of pretty.

You get the idea. Sinister, pretty. Menacing, enchanting. Waters and Robinson (amongst other conceptual concerns) seem to argue that beauty is never simple. Pretty things, niceness, sweet bits are all permeated with a sickly quality. Lurking behind that sweet girl (the one wearing the cute red velveteen slippers and the darling vintage frock) you saw at FELT last Wednesday are all kinds of murky waters. Wait, what? You haven’t even been to the opening yet. When is it again? Wednesday, August 4th, three dollar beers.