Description
City of Melbourne’s Laneway Commissions 2008 – a season of contemporary artworks in the public domain – present six diverse projects in the CBD. Follow your Desire down Manton Lane……. A neon portrait of Agony and Ecstasy awaits you. ‘Agony/Ecstasy’ exists to annul itself as an advertising sign. It contains the mechanisms of a promotional sign yet it sells nothing except itself. It sits between a blank white space and a constant pulsing machine, with its lights pointing nowhere – a sign to nothing, containing no end point. The portrait alludes to the image of a classical figure at the nexus of agony and ecstasy. The neon is a subversion of materials and processes inherent within the advertising industry – processes that incite desire and saturation.
Desire does not turn off. Artists: Phebe Parisia, Eddy Carroll, John Howland