7 April–15 May, 2004

Catriona Jeffries Gallery presented, Every surface in someway decorated, altered, or changed forever (except the float), 2004, a new installation by Geoffrey Farmer.

In a thematic continuation of Farmer's recent work entitled Parade, Party or Protest, 2003, this new work is derived from the socio-sculptural form of the parade float. By stacking and painting shelving units, tables and various wooden forms on a flat deck trailer to a height exceeding the gallery's ceiling, Farmer creates a combine that extrudes through a large hole in the roof. Over the course of this 5 week exhibition, Farmer will work to construct wall surface cut-ups, collages and sculptural components which will cover the interior space of the gallery conflating a range of meanings spanning from the personal to the socio-political. As the artist attempts to open up aspects of the modernist sculptural form and rework the secret interiority of sculpture and statuary, he exposes ideas of expression, the avant-garde and the social critique.

Accompanying this installation, in the lower gallery are Farmer's new photomontages of piles. In these collage images the artist meticulously stacks his collection of image inventory high into a rubble pile of dislocated objects corresponding to the heaped parade float stack. The resultant image pile forms a hallucinatory luminescent miniature world of oversupply inhabited by orphaned objects and mournful ghosts.