“Can’t Do Hard Sun Whim” brings together artists and designers whose work engages with ideas of light and wear in various ways—as both material processes and conceptual states. Here, light appears as a physical phenomenon and as a condition enabling visibility and perception; wear manifests as a force of erosion and transformation, but also as a mode of carrying, inhabiting, or embodying something. Through wearable sculpture, monotype, textile objects, cyanotype, slide projections, video, and installation, the exhibition examines how materials, bodies, and images change under the influence of time, contact, and environmental conditions.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from writer Duncan Smith’s essay “Australis”: “I prefer to avoid the harsh sun, as I find it very difficult to simply sunbathe without a methodical approach—which, in turn, becomes tedious. Even the letters of my name, Duncan Howard Smith, can be rearranged to form the anagram ‘Can’t Do Hard Sun Whim’.” *
