The Inheritors by Laura Hudson, 2018
Oil and spray paint on canvas
153 x 101cm
 
The creaturely, masked or augmented faces manifest in my work precisely because I believe our political systems have ruptured. The State’s power has again taken on catastrophic enmity toward its people with declared hostility towards the ‘other’ and alterity beyond its borders. The Inheritors (The Takers), points to a break-down in the symbolic social order, making reference to the Renaissance marking the birth of capitalism, the Weimar Republic as a symbol of excess and precursor to fascism while the bird-headed creature, that is part bird (a survivor species) and part human, points to Hal Foster’s assertion that the creaturely can be viewed ‘as a symptom of a crisis in the symbolic order’ manifesting throughout history (from palaeolithic Therianthropes to post-war Cobra) at times of crisis or whenever the symbolic order cracks under political pressure which is...potentially right now.
 
Laura Hudson is an artist and writer with a background in film and new media curation. Her early work took the form of public interventions, site-specific works and expanded cinema with a distinctly queer-feminist agenda, which led into curation and a career specialising in political avant-garde film and new technologies. 
 
The order will be fulfilled by the artist following purchase on White Rectangle Gallery Shop.