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"Brophy's sampling of pop culture offsets the uniform consistency of the status quo with its transgression, a wavering between repression and parodic anarchy."
Tanya Peterson, Artspace Projects 2006, Sydney, 2007"Although, in and of itself, the unaltered reuse of an entire saccharine sweet rock performance from a family orientated TV show might initially remind us of (...) the late 1970s and early 1980s, such a comparison quickly pales once we absorb both the complexities and poetics of such a dissonant audio-visual juxtaposition."
Sean Lowry , Broadsheet Vol.36 No.1, Adelaide, 2007"A technical tour de force (...) creepily mesmerizing."
AF, Artkrush No.43, New York, 2006
Link to complete online PDF review
Sean Lowry , Broadsheet Vol.36 No.1, Adelaide, 2007
"Philip Brophy's video installation Evaporated Music 2: At the Mouth of Metal is a technical tour de force. Beginning with saccharine soft rock video clips, the artist removes the original music and substitutes a death metal soundtrack. Brophy's new, nonsensical "metal" lyrics perfectly match the lip sync of the original. The effect is creepily mesmerizing, suggesting that what we take for "style" is little more than an empty vessel. The subtitle reinforces this idea with a punning reference to John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995), an homage to H. P. Lovecraft. Evaporated Music 2 continues the artist's long-standing fascination with disrupting musical genres. His three-screen installation Fluorescent, currently included in the Singapore Biennale, explores similar ground through glam rock."
AF, Artkrush No.43, New York, 2006
"(... ) Evaporated Music 2 positions us within the seemingly safe domain of domesticity, only to violate our regulated pleasure by showing us its obscenity. The exploitation of biomorphic horror within this work reveals a society where identity has become a pornographic caricature verging on the point of normality. The upside, however, is the humour that comes from these exaggerated feats of untenable compliance overwhelmed by the collective idealism of the mainstream. With a winking playfulness, Brophy's work leaves us with the contradictory logic of rationalised insanity. It tempts us with the possibility of madness beyond the mouth of commercialised banality - a madness where the body is free to exist in all its grisly beauty."
Tanya Peterson, Artspace Projects 2006, Sydney, 2007
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy