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Right now, living through lockdown, existence is reductive. Few friends, wilting joy, silenced laughter, nowhere to get lost. These feelings have impregnated the things creative people are creating, too: empty cityscapes, socially distanced portraits, solemn poems and soliloquies and earnest, livestreamed solo shows abound.
This type of art undoubtedly helps some, and it’s important to continue documenting this moment – but for me these works have become depressing totems of the things I crave. Their dourness doesn’t reflect the vibrant, roiling emotions many of us are carrying, and sometimes hiding for the sake of those we live with.
“Even though these are empty times, they’re so full,” says the Melbourne-based visual artist Garrett Huxley, describing the juxtaposition between his internal landscape and the world outside. “It’s like a psychological battleground in your own home. It’s really colourful and so confronting.”
Unbalanced, the new work he created with his partner, Will, is for anyone who has been craving colour in the chaos.
Available online, Unbalanced’s photographs and video are populated by manic, brightly coloured characters fellating plastic bananas; wielding LED wands, dildos and crucifixes; or hurling around chairs and tiny Justin Bieber sex dolls in frenzied bursts of adrenaline.
“[We were] sitting at home every day, feeling another really crazy emotion … you wake up really terrified, or really bored, or horny,” says Will. “These characters represent people that are really stressed out and people that are longing to touch things and have sex.”
The Huxleys have been fixtures at many Australian festivals, most notably Dark Mofo, where their lurid, sparkling costumes and characters seem to sprout erogenous zones with each dropped sequin. Facing cancelled performances and shuttered galleries, they poured their anxieties into Unbalanced.
“What’s saved me throughout my life is making something that helps me escape from reality,” Will says. “We [wanted to] make something that’s funny, that will make us laugh and is ridiculous, but that’s responding to the darkness we – and all our friends – were feeling.”
Each character in Unbalanced started from a list of emotions describing different types of fear and arousal. Things like “too many conspiracies!”, “just fucked” or “horny + worried”. For each emotion they’d draw matching, cartoonish faces resembling a Freudian game of Guess Who?, which they’d paint on to their skin-tight masks.
“I’m particularly attracted to people that are kind of terrified and happy at the same time,” Garrett says. “I think Britney Spears has that look in her early career, that manic smile. During Covid we’re just trying to keep our shit together; I’m smiling but you know things are really crazy.”
In some of the photos you can see the Huxleys’ cathartic screaming beneath their cartoon masks. Each image was captured in-camera using 15-second exposures, during which Will would engage a flash trigger, creating in-the-moment multiple exposures. The add up to bottled madness and pandemic pandemonium.
“I came out of it feeling like I had exorcised … all these kind of weird things that were haunting me inside,” Will says. “It was a way of processing all that, but making me laugh at the end of it rather than being more scared.”
There are other works that come close to communicating the emotional chaos of the moment, including Jonathan Glazer’s convulsing dancers in Strasbourg 1518; or Charli XCX’s lockdown-recorded single Forever, for which the English pop star compiled phone-recorded fan clips into a hyperactive music video. But even those are necessarily burdened by low-resolution fuzz, unlike the high def and highly saturated work of the Huxleys.
For many of us, not just artists, phone cameras and amateur recording set-ups have been the only tools for communication and expression. But that visual language of low resolution video, compressed audio, queasy fluorescent lighting and stuttering bit rates will remain part of the amnesiac static in which days drifted into months – and it isn’t what I’ll remember lockdown for.
Instead, I’ll remember the vivid outbursts of fear, anger and lust. Like infrequent, sloppy living room sex, throwing a wobbly about cooking a chicken, or realising it’s tears obscuring my vision while listening to the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights on repeat at 4am.
My own creativity had already been drifting to lurid, frantic and fantastical places too. Years of taking tasteful black and white film photographs have made way for post-coital photoshoots in full colour; or lighting up brightly coloured street trash with my flash.
I’ve been drawn to the alien creations of the Melbourne florists XXFlos, whose unnatural colour palette makes those spiky, pink visualisations of coronavirus particles seem kind of cute. I’ve been wearing sheer shirts that show my nipples through palm tree cutouts, and the hectic drum & bass of my late teens has been muscling out tasteful disco.
Seared on to my retinas, the Huxleys’s hyperactive reveries have shown me how much I crave absurdity, vibrancy and intensity right now; and that wallowing in the drudgery isn’t helping my sanity. They’ve reminded me that sometimes, when it’s scary, the best thing to do is just thrash around until you find out what feels good.
• Unbalanced by the Huxleys is available to view here
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