Seaside Vernacular

Overview

When you’re dreaming up the location for your next holiday you might look to your friends, a travel blog or maybe even a travel agent if you're pushing 40. Not Melbourne artist Thomas Jeppe — his most recent sojourn was set in stone after he spied a sardine tin with pictures of a seemingly perfect European fishing village. The result of his trip, Seaside Vernacular, is presented in the ghost of a shipping container, a nod toward the new global influences that have come to shape the village and the artist’s concerns about the reality of life there.

As with most things from a can, the packaging didn’t reflect the reality of what was inside and when Jeppe visited the Canary Islands what he found was not the sleepy town that the sardines had promised. Instead he was presented with a low budget tourist village that had been disrupted by recession, with rotting half-finished building ventures and crowds of English, Russian and other European tourists.

While Jeppe’s practice has come to be characterised by an exploration of work and labour, Seaside Vernacular departs from this theme slightly by examining the value of research in coming to a conceptual position. Oh, it also features a two metre tall painting of a bare-breasted woman with a bird head.