In his examination of Western popular culture and its desires, Sydney artist Heath Franco asks the fundamental question, ‘What is sexy?’
The answer: ‘LIFE IS SEXY’ (2016-17), a single-channel video that reflects capital vices of lust, leisure, escapism, greed and power in the shadow of Trump’s presidential election. Franco created the piece, in part, through the 2015 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging), offered by the State Government through Create NSW to enable an artist to undertake a self-directed program of professional development. He spent time in the United States, training with influential pop-video director Joel Kefali, whose conceptual digital work balances composition with layered technique and performance. While abroad, the artist explored concepts of place, spatial parameters, colour saturation and hyper-realism; refining his use of photography, performance, costume, sound, digital media, special effects and installation in his latest postmodern pastiche with content that will either repel or compel its audience.

Heath Franco, LIFE IS SEXY (video still), 2016–17, HD digital video, 8:9, duration: 15:11. Location performance videography by Jodie Whalen. Courtesy the artist and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales
‘LIFE IS SEXY’ features a cast of rather Lynchian eccentric, grotesque characters clad in garish clothing who occupy the streets of Times Square in New York, the casinos of Las Vegas or the Sunset Strip in California. Improvised by Franco – the sole performer – personalities include: a zany, doughnut-carrying clown; a sweaty bling- encrusted, money-obsessed individual (reflecting the economic inequality the artist witnessed); a rainbow-fused figure wielding a unicorn on a stick; a shirtless male with sagging pants and ink-drawn muscles; a Michael Jackson fan in bondage gear (single glove included); as well as a cross-dressing semi-nude
in fishnet stockings. Their anonymity enables Franco to play with repetition, placing them in new scenes and contexts, yet in constant critique. Even though the film predates Trump’s America, Franco is able to dress-up, dance and ridicule masculinity, social taboos and hierarchy, and through a sinister, bubble-blowing Uncle Sam he personifies the socio-political Republican idiocy felt today.
A static flag composed of red, white and blue figures representing American citizens morphs into a painterly mess, illustrating the chasm between media-shaped expectations and reality. Franco borrows Baudrillard’s notion of hyper-reality – one that combines opposing concepts like real and illusion, fact and fantasy – by hyperbolically playing with multiple realities to generate a parallel world where concepts of ‘fun’, ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’ are all attainable. The work echoes the semantic extension and overuse of these shallow terms throughout the Paris Hilton-era. Franco searches for ‘desire and sexiness (be it real or faux)’, writes Katherine Guiness in the an essay for The National, ‘in palm trees, sunsets, doughnuts, neon, tanning, leisure, sparkly nail polish, bronze families, mall picnics, and the spurting water features forged from the barren deserts of western cities’. He constructs a ‘sin city’, the primal scene of sexuality, satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption.

Heath Franco, LIFE IS SEXY (video still), 2016–17, HD digital video, 8:9, duration: 15:11. Location performance videography by Jodie Whalen. Courtesy the artist and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, New South Wales
Franco brings this sexiness back to Australia in psychedelic montages, disillusioned realities, simulated narratives, repetitive gestures, and memorable jingles looped to create distressed rhythms and risqué climaxes. Replete with subversive double entendres, the work captures the superficiality of the needs and wants of modern society governed by a single thought, that life is ‘sexy’.
Melissa Pesa is a Sydney-based arts writer
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
Until 29 April, 2018
New South Wales