Fuck Me Dead, 2022
Mixed media assemblage comprising funeral hearse, found objects, glass, shells, LED lights, acrylic paint and plastic flooring.
dimensions 592.5cm x 379cm x 149cm

Paul Yore’s irreverent approach gleans from the material excess and consumer churn of late capitalism, the wasteland of the Anthropocene. Melding political critique with a joyous celebration of queerness, his works are imbued with the festive energy of a Mardi Gras parade at the end of the world.

Entombed within this mosaic sculpture and forming its armature is an upcycled hearse, itself modified from an iconic Australian car, the ‘70s Ford Fairlane, a luxury emblem of masculine productivity and petro-capitalism. The automobile was produced at the height of the oil crisis, a time when limits to economic growth were acknowledged through a recognition of the planet’s finite resources. The artwork’s title, Fuck Me Dead, refers to the car’s former funerary role, signifying the hopeful decay of fossil fuelled transportation and unchecked capitalist expansion.

Yore’s practice transmutes waste and detritus into something charged and talismanic through a kind of queer alchemy. Drawing on rainbow-coloured cacophony of mass-produced consumer trinkets, kitsch Australiana, mature content, and found slogans, artistic methods such as collage, quilting and assemblage all enable a ‘camp détournement,’ a subversive intervention which hijacks existing images and their meanings. Fuck Me Dead belongs within Yore’s arsenal of queer world building as death, too, can symbolically augur change. With its shimmering mosaic surfaces, phallic fertility symbols and blinging LED party lights, outmoded motifs and dead ideas are reborn anew.

Represented by STATION (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne), Booth K5 and Hugo Michell (Kaurna Country/Adelaide) Booth B3.