Are You Having A Good Night? is Victorian-based artist Michelle Hamer’s first solo exhibition in WA. For years, Hamer has documented aggressive and patronising language aimed at women. In this new series of intricate hand-stitched works and drawings she continues her engagement with the threatening language many women face daily.
Drawing on an archive of collected language, from her own experiences and those of other women, Hamer’s works highlights the pervasiveness of threats, the roles we all play in embedded power and the irony and complexity of language in the #metoo moment.
Captured in the analogue slowness of stitching, Hamer’s scenes depict the pace and immediacy of modern life in vivid tropical Hawaiian landscapes, Australian bush scenes and evening landscapes. Incorporating LED signage and billboards as the vehicle for this messaging, Hamer’s work embeds her experiences in the mundane surrounds of the urban environment and highlights the utter everydayness of threats.
About the artist
Michelle Hamer is a Melbourne based artist who uses signage and language to reflect the restrictions, shame and mixed messages we all experience at some point in our lives and that she negotiates every day.
Hamer graduated architecture (RMIT University 1999) but gave up her career to navigate EDS – a connective tissue disorder. While living with a chronic disability forced constraints on her ability to thrive in her chosen profession, it also led to reimagining herself and an accidental career as a visual artist.
Hamer’s work is poignant, insightful, witty and cutting. Her primary interest is in how language in the urban environment impacts us – often not in the ways it was originally intended.
Are You Having A Good Night? is her 23rd solo exhibition.
Read the exhibition catalogue
In the media
- Exhibition Review Seesaw Magazine: Fremantle Double Feature Delights (14 Oct 2020)
