Endless Summer: Sunglasses and the spectacle of vision
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Studio 12
18 May – 16 June 2007
200 Gertrude Street Fitzroy Australia


Endless Summer catalogue (500KB)
Audio of monologue (MP3 6MB)

Endless Summer chronicles one man’s obsession with sunglasses. The exhibition consists of a sequence of portraits of the man wearing his collection of sunglasses, in which each of the 37 images is the same except he’s wearing a different pair – one for every summer of his life. The gallery space is constructed as a viewing experience with two floor-to-ceiling tinted acrylic panels that can be looked though like lenses, as an altered perceptual experience like wearing a pair of spectacles. A voice-over accompanies the installation, with the man recollecting his summers past as he tries on each pair.



Adopted by twentieth-century fashion and celebrity culture, sunglasses are revealing embodiments and representations of human desire. The work sets up a comparison between sunglasses, photography and vision, exploring the implications of lens and framing, as well as the varying capacities of each to contain time, and memorialise. Endless Summer looks at the psychological and cultural aspects of sunglasses, as objects and instruments of altered perception, from both sides of the lens.