Glenn Sloggett - A White Trash (Lost) Love Story

Glenn Sloggett looks at how the grand themes of life, death, success and failure are realised in the ordinary language of the suburbs. His artworks embrace the unlovable and he finds beauty in what many would see as repellant. His images - a travelogue of broken-down and piss-stained suburbia - show an affection and respect for his subjects. There are no people in these photographs and they are almost forensic in their banality, yet there is also a beauty in these subtle colour images, which exposes both the frailty and the persistence of hope.

Throughout his work he taps into the painful clarity of the moment where the lover realises that the beloved just doesn’t like them that much. They have absolutely no chance. The photographs are images of diseased flowers, a waiting dog, graffiti, bright plastic flowers with bright plastic brooms, armless mannequins, cars with tarpaulins on them hitched up on blocks and grinning eager looking skeletons in second hand stores. Each image tells us about how the lover sees themselves, at that moment, as somehow discarded and repellent. Sloggett also captures the way the outside world responds to signs of a broken hearted self-pity with a sort of bashful cringe.

Anna Newbold

Sloggett has exhibited extensively both in Australia and internationally. In 2008, he won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award. Group exhibitions include Art Cologne 2007; The 9th Mois de la Photo in Montreal, 2005; New Australiana, an Australian Centre for Photography touring exhibition, and Photographica Australis at ARCO 2002 in Madrid curated by Alasdair Foster, Director of the Australian Centre for Photography. The ACP also toured a solo exhibition of Slogget’s work entitled Cheaper & Deeper from 2002-2007. In 2001, Glenn won the inaugural John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for an emerging photographer, Albury Regional Art Gallery. His artworks are held in the collections of Art Gallery of NSW, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Wangarratta Exhibitions Gallery and Albury Regional Gallery.