Thoroughbred

Thoroughbred is a photographic instillation incorporating digital/analogue photography, an adapted receipt machine, and the use of a vaporizer covered in asphalt, which emits the smell of athletic heat rub. The work alludes to the way competitive corporate workplace culture ornaments its practices, enveloping its graze with a certain grace. The project has a personal dimension for Alex Kershaw who photographed his mother on her lunch break from work over a period of four months. The formal arrangement of a person enveloped in a suit is mirrored on the adjacent wall with an enlargement of a high school portrait taken in 1998.

Thoroughbred presents competitiveness as a cultural construct that perhaps diverts its more innate biological manifestations. A kinetic force, magnetising the way we ornament ourselves and the way we prepare our bodies in order to move through the world as we face-off with its disciplinary protocols.

Links

Perfect Strangers curated by Blair French at the Centre for contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2000)