When you can’t laugh, you cry. LOL features artists that respond to the concept ‘Lol’ – often used as an acronym for ‘laugh out loud’ but is also sometimes misread as ‘lots of love’.
This lighthearted exhibition features emerging and mid-career artists who explore humour and love through emotions of frustration, elation, repulsion and power.
Featuring Hailey Atkins, Joseph Breikers, Kate Land and Erika Scott. Curated by Sarah Werkmeister.
Curated by Sarah Werkmeister
Outer Space is a not-for-profit Contemporary Arts organisation. We collaborate with artists and arts workers to develop, make, and present critically engaged creative practice in a supportive professional environment. Our exhibitions, events, and programs welcome those involved in, and curious about the arts. Outer Space is committed to fostering a sustainable creative community in Brisbane that engages local, regional, national and global contexts.
Hailey Atkins is a Brisbane based sculptural artist. She graduated at Queensland College of Art in 2016 (Bachelor of Fine Art, Hons – Class I) and has since exhibited frequently in Queensland, as well as interstate (Sydney, Hobart) and internationally (Utrecht, Rotterdam, NL) and is currently represented by har.art in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Hailey was selected as a finalist of Churchie Emerging Art Prize in 2018 and was co-founded Wreckers Artspace in Brisbane.
Joseph Breikers’ practice is centred around humour and language, and their ability to engage with areas of slippage and overlap. He across various media, including sculpture, drawing, painting, video and installation, and experiments with collaboration, sound, performance, writing and music-based events. His work often develops from his engagement with text and language theory and his concern with the tropes of the underclass. He is interested in using humour and language to find new ways of understanding how the complex field of intellectual and socio-political contexts impact on the role and expectations of contemporary art. He is also drawn to humour as a possible strategy for deflecting traditional systems of exegesis. Joseph holds a Master of Arts (Research) from the Queensland University of Technology and has shown both nationally and internationally.
Kate Land is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist whose multidisciplinary practice celebrates the absurdity of the everyday. Her practice engages primarily with themes around success, and seeks to upend conventional perceptions of legitimacy and accomplishment, especially within the framework of making art. As she untangles her own anxiety, Kate uses humour as a device to reframe conversations about mental health. Her work leans on the pathos inherent to the collective experience of failure, and the absurd futility of fear. Wordplay is the cornerstone of Kate’s approach, pairing witticisms with imagery to create visual puns that are at once personal and universal. Her sculptural and installation works feature a cache of found, manufactured and assembled materials – zeroing in on the absurdity of the mundane object. She is particularly fascinated by the potential of metaphor, blurring the line between literal and figurative. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Queensland University of Technology.
Erika Scott is a Brisbane-based artist who predominantly works in sculpture and installation. Scott’s visual language unfolds through a variety of media, often reassembling and modifying discarded household objects, furniture, and popular culture debris—resulting in a maximalist and often overwhelming DIY bricolage. The environments and constructions that Scott creates encourage an unsettling ambivalence, part attraction and repulsion, anxiety and relaxation. Her recent solo exhibitions include On Fire, 2021 (IMA, Brisbane); The Dutch Aquarium, 2020 (Outer Space, Brisbane); The Barnacle Lovers, 2017 (Wreckers ARI, Brisbane); and Pestorius Sweeney House Exhibition, 2016 (Pestorius Projects, Brisbane). Scott completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (2010). Scott is also the founding director of local ARI The Soylent Spot and the workshop and residency coordinator for Sculptors Queensland.
Sarah Werkmeister is a freelance writer, editor, researcher, broadcaster and curator based between Melbourne and Brisbane. She has written extensively and worked with L’Internationale Online to develop publications around the environment (Ecologising Museums, 2016) and feminism (Feminisms, 2018), and has co-edited a chapter on the 13th Istanbul Biennial in I Can’t Work Like This: A reader on recent boycotts and contemporary art (2017). She’s worked with QUT Art Museum, Shepparton Art Museum, Public Art Melbourne, Next Wave, YIRRAMBOI Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, Blak & Bright, BIRRARANGGA Film Festival, The Thousands, 4ZZZ and many more. She’s currently on the Darebin Art & Heritage Advisory Committee, the Outer Space board, and the Bus Projects Artistic Advisory Committee. Her research interests encompass representations of nationhood in public art collections, conceptions of public space, and the climate. She holds a Masters of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
