Shari Hatt

Liberace˙s Closet

June 15 – July 7, 2007

Douglas Coupland, artist and author of Generation X says: "(Hatt's photographs)... are brilliant and they really challenge notions of personality, identity, gender, sexuality, capitalism and you-name-it. You can't imagine the lightning storms in my brain when I entered the gallery!"

Photo-based artist Shari Hatt brings her large format work to Paul Petro Contemporary Art continuing her investigation of photographic portraiture and popular culture. Well-known for her offbeat All Elvis Honky, Honky Burnin’ Love Museum, Hatt has turned her lens on another much-loved performer - Wladziu Valentino Liberace.

Liberace˙s Closet (2002) was created in cooperation with the celebrated Liberace Museum in Las Vegas where Hatt worked as the “Official Photographer to the Liberace Museum”. This series of large-scale colour photographs showcase details of Liberace's onstage wardrobe, attire overlaid with couture quality embellishments that take on fantastic proportions. A gifted working class performer who reinvented himself as an object of adoration for millions of fans, Liberace set the bar for conspicuous consumption, equating success with excess but never without a sense of generosity. While Hatt˙s portraits reflect on Liberace's gender-fluidity, his appeal to the middle-aged ladies he resembled veiled his private homosexuality. The glittering facade of this showbiz legend cultivates our perpetual fascination with the private lives of the very famous.

Amy Karlinsky, of The Winnipeg Free Press writes: "Hatt's cleverness is not just in the re-presentation of Liberace's dazzling style, but in the viewer's mimicry of excessive consumption in the act of looking. Realism. Realism. Oh, the world, in such an immediate, material, and pleasurable vastness!"

Shari Hatt is a photo-based artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia who is currently based in Montreal and Toronto. She has studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. She has exhibited her work in Canada and abroad since 1993. Hatt has received a number of fellowships, scholarships and grants, including the Canada Bureau of International Education Celanese Fellowship (1998) and the Duke and Duchess of York Photography Prize (2001). Hatt was the first artist chosen for the prestigious British residency program by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canadian High Commission (UK) (2003). The Art Bank of the Canada Council, The Banff Centre for the Arts, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Art Gallery of Windsor, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, The Cygnet Foundation NYC, The Liberace Museum, Museum London, The National Gallery of Canada & The Canadian Museum for Contemporary Photography, The Norton Museum of Art, and Seneca College have recently acquired her photographic work for their collections. Her chihuahua and mentor, Garry Lewis has recently exhibited his sculptures in Toronto with a show upcoming in New York.