Liam HOULIHAN

Lousy T-Shirt Stall

t-shirts silkscreened with phosphorescent ink, UV ironing press, UV barcode scanners

Sample t-shirts

Close-up of design

Souvenirs tend to be cheap, tacky, mass-produced commodities, but can also hold great sentimental meaning. As physical evidence and reassurance of our existence in a particular past space and time, they remind us that ‘You were here’ and ‘everything was alright’.

Lousy T-shirt Stall is an interactive performance/installation in the form of a pop-up outlet in which the artist sells t-shirts (i.e. souvenirs) silkscreened with the following glow-in-the-dark phrase, appropriated from kitschy amusement park memorabilia:

‘I survived the 10th  Anniversary Desert Equinox, Broken Hill 2022’.

When a shirt is purchased, the text is ‘charged up’ by a UV ironing press, as the pigment only reacts with light in UV wavelengths. One minute of exposure provides up to an hour of gradually waning phosphorescence. Customers who wish to recharge their shirts on site will be assisted by technicians wielding UV barcode scanners.

The work contemplates the tensions between artwork and commodity, between artist and labourer. The act of selling souvenirs and running a business undermines the artist’s many anxieties (emotional, cultural, financial) and misgivings associated with making and viewing art.

Liam is a sculpture/installation artist living and working on Wallumattagal land in Sydney. Liam’s practice subverts the authorship of the artist and diffuses agency into the hands of the audience – his way, he says, of ‘coping with the possibility that myhis work will be an abysmal, inexcusable mess’ – as well as a means of exposing the global economies of labour typically invisible in art production. To date Liam’s work tends to consider the desires and anxieties of young people and students.

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