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Richard Hughes | CI08 Life on Mars

  • Posted on August 19, 2011 at 4:49 am

Civic pride appears to have gone awry in Richard Hughes’ art, and once-fresh cultural forces have withered. His meticulously constructed sculptures are often cast or carved from resin to closely replicate items that might be found in a hovel of a rooming house or unceremoniously dumped by the side of the road—bleak monuments to abused domestic or public spaces. “Magic” mushrooms—whose sculpted forms sprout from a number of Hughes’ works—constitute a veiled reference to the faded idealism of a generalized psychedelic moment. In addition to these artfully constructed imposters, Hughes creates arrangements of actual items, typically soft materials like bags of garbage or soiled sleeping bags. These double-take installations appear to transform into recognizable images only when seen from a specific angle. The legacy of degeneration and disaffection left by a failed but once-bright vision of social modernity seems to permeate the artist’s work like a bad smell. The exploration of such themes harks back to British cinema and theater of the so-called Kitchen Sink movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but the social commentary in Hughes’ practice transcends national identities. —Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International Widely known as one of the pre-eminent international surveys of contemporary art in the world, the Carnegie International was founded at the behest of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. With the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest such …

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