Joel Zika - Miracle Strip

Dianne Tanzer Gallery

An exhibition of artworks that awaken a lost world  

 

Artist Joel Zika creates prints, videos and sculptures that bring to life lost amusement parks from the past 100 years.

 

This exhibition will run in conjunction with the Gertrude St Projection Festival, with Dianne Tanzer Gallery hosting an enormous projection in their front window every night.

 

‘Miracle Strip’ refers to an amusement park in Panama City Beach (USA), demolished in 2006 after laying abandoned for over three years.   The sight was earmarked to become a major property development only to be left empty in the wake of the financial crisis.   Photographs of this site and others have become the inspiration for Zika’s brooding gothic landscapes.

Joel’s work has long been obsessed with the dark and mysterious world of the amusement park.    The dystopian vision of an abandoned fair ground is a space rich with mythological importance in the world of popular entertainment and cinema.   In this show Zika plays to that mythology but gives the rides themselves a new kind of life.

The architecture and detritus in the images seems to command a sort of kinetic energy; with beams of wood exploding and falling across the plane.  In Zika’s world it is the architecture that has been re-animated and given life but the visitors of the past are nowhere to be seen.