The Thousands

Michelle Hanlin may fool you with her kinder sherbet colour palette but it’s important you realise she is performing a particularly good assault of the contemporary monument.

If you were to term it in music, her works (sculptural and painted still lifes, busts and figures on ornamental plinths) are much like Sonic Youth appropriating Debussy with a spoken word introduction from the local St Vinnies clerk. Her jungle salad of historical and contemporary components cut and paste the art deco surroundings of her apartment, civic architecture and adornments of her peers with elements of Cubism (with its avant-guarde angles) and Futurism (with its industrial eye for life on speed).

Her cultic sculptures stand alone while her ambiguous humanoid paintings are paired so as to welcome a dialogue between couples.

Her opaque metaphorical rainbows are are telling and allegorical. They’re the architectural tools of her reality placed on pedestals under review.