Gerard O’Connor and Marc Wasiak’s photographic art works are as darkly beautiful as they are enormous; sometimes as tall as your average impeccably tailored Victorian wolf man, wide as any wigged dowager who ever rustled across a croquet lawn in lavender scented silk…”
And so begins the Sydney Morning Herald review of Gerard O’Connor and Marc Wasiak’s latest exhibition, by Janice Breen Berg.
The images are striking. That’s something at which the pair, who have also created eye-catching ad work, excel.
“We know people want to be engaged and amazed,” O’Connor told the SMH. “We live quite sterile lives now, sterile homes, sterile jobs. People are intrigued by lush, decorative places, by art, craftsmanship. They crave things that make them feel something when they look at it. They love to be amazed.”
The pictures are based on a true story about a woman who lived in the beautiful Labassa, a gothic mansion in East St Kilda and now a National Trust House under restoration.
The house was full of imports from Paris in the 1870s, then was rented as a boarding house for 120 years with “good, bad and really famous tenants – movie stars, ballerinas, artists.” Age wearied it, but its beauty survived.
From the 1890s, it was owned by wealthy Cobb and Co. founder, Alexander Robertson.
In the early 1900s, it hosted some of Melbourne’s most famous parties, at which the woman who has fascinated O’Connor, “would paint boys gold and make them stand like human candelabras on her dining table holding burning candles, while her guests discussed art, fashion and music…How fabulous!! She also had a wolvine boyfriend.”
The exhibition is the pair’s “factual fictitious story”, O’Connor notes.
“The house survived a long history from its beginnings in 1860, so we made up a gothic story, Angels & Wolves, based on the house…and life in general, really.”
The Angel in the photos is the symbol of the surviving spirit of the house – good and bad, like life, he adds.
The exhibition, held for five weeks across May and June in Melbourne, consists of seven gigantic photographs. They have been selected by the City of Melbourne to be a part of their Melbourne Spring Fashion Festival curated October 2017, and to be part of Festival of Light Argentina 2018. Smaller-size framed prints were created at the end of the exhibition for sale.
