MALLRATS

Outerface Program, Outerspace Gallery Brisbane

Phoebe Paradise’s sense of place is in lockstep with Brisbane’s newfound sense of confidence that it is, in fact, a city worthy of three-dimensional identity. Fiercely local and running independently as a brand since 2014, Phoebe has stuck loyally to the illustrious 4000 postcode, holding up a sort of mirror to Brisbane’s many faces and iterations: the paradisaical, sure, but also the bad, the dirty, and the ugly.

Growing up in a music and arts circle which un-ironically professed their love of Brisbane by snapping bright blue skies, only to then share them under the passport shredder banner – “a city so good you don’t need a passport!” –, I have grown (understandably) averse to the Brisbanite celebratory spirit. A by-product of Expo 88’s tourism schism, it fails to acknowledge the various dark histories entrenched along the way, from Aboriginal land-grabbing through to military in-fighting, government censorship, and – last but not least – police brutality toward anyone who dared not be a quiet Australian.

In Phoebe’s vast and various imagined worlds, on the other hand, there is never an effort to smooth the terrifying or the turbulent. Quite the contrary: darkness becomes celebratory, a kind of negative bliss – or an inverse manifestation of the aesthetic notion that is the sublime. In Mallrats (2022), Phoebe’s distinctive illustrative style depicts a gig-hopping scene plucked straight from a night out in Fortitude Valley. Drowned in neon lights, a “cast of freaks, punks and weirdos” (1) waits to be stamped into a venue seemingly unaffected by inflation pricing while a sedan drives eerily by. As accomplice voyeurs, our viewpoint shifts alongside the driver’s slow revving. A haunting presence of the uncanny sets in as the neon contorts into varying shades, the street characters getting progressively weirder and more hellish. This demonisation of space is what Foucault calls the agenda of the gothic sublime (2) – but we could just call it Pig City, Bris Vegas, or even the essence of Phoebe Paradise.

Outerface Via Outerspace

Documentation by Cian Saunders