Half Flush
112 pages, 23 x 16 cm, hardcover
Perimeter Editions 010
Edition of 600
ISBN: 978-0-9873530-7-8
Using the standard pack of cards as his organizing principle, Hilton mixes desire, degradation, contamination, zealotry and violence into a brew often sweetened by humor. Each suit has a theme that works more as a starting point than a defining rule: diamonds are class; hearts are religion; spades are nationalism; clubs are the environment. Using graphite pencil on white paper, Hilton employs a range of styles, from highly intricate realism to cartoons and simple line sketches.
The two-way design of the playing card is used as the basis for the series’ double-meanings and double-readings. The ten of clubs, for instance, shows an overweight person on a scale. From one vantage, we read his or her weight; from the other, we make out the word “obese”. The design on the back of the cards is also irregular – while it shares the intricate patterning common to many packs, it seems to depict a bell-shape entering a flowery hole (and there’s no prize for guessing what that alludes to). The book features an essay by John Thomson, co-director of Foxy Production, New York.
Half Flush was published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, November 2015.
dontworry
131 pages, hardcover including color plates.
Essays by Chris McAuliffe, Jarrod Rawlins & Maria Tumarkin.
Edition of 800
ISBN 978-0-646-90779-6
Mark Hilton's dontworry documents the making of the Melbourne artist's major commission for Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. The book and includes essays by Chris McAuliffe, Amita Kirpalani, Maria Tumarkin and Jarrod Rawlins.
The details of the relief sculpture documented in the book serve as aesthetic signifiers of suburban trauma, paranoia, racism, molestation and addiction, dealing in both the traditional language of the relief and the darker details of contemporary life.
Excerpt from Rawlins' essay -
"Where am I going with this? Intention. My interest here lies somewhere between the artist intention and another potential reading. dontworry is a chronicle of white working-class social problems – death, apathy, drug addiction, mental illness, suicide, racism, nationalism, fear, and greed: shit basically. And just as a contemporary white working-class life is a series of inexplicable paradoxes, so too is dontworry. So how does an artwork like this become free of didacticism? How do we understand dontworry if moral instruction is not an ulterior motive? To explain how I will rely on the work of Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, in particular his musings on the film The Sound of Music."
