Thoroughbred is the first solo show of work by Alex Kershaw. It is a photographic instillation, incorporating digital/analogue photography, motorised machine dispensing standard receipt paper, and the use of a vaporizer covered in asphalt, which emits the smell of athletic heat rub. Much of contemporary workplace culture ornaments its practices, by enveloping their graze with grace. The work looks at competitiveness as a cultural construct - competitiveness as a kinesthesia, magnetising the way we move. How does this force over time channel our desires and yearnings, how does a person develop and ornament themselves under the necessary protocol of a competitive workplace?

The project has a personal dimension for Alex who photographed his mother on her lunchbreak from work over a period of 4-months. The formal arrangement of a person enveloped in a suit is mirrored on the adjacent wall with an enlargement of a school portrait taken in 1998 where Alex went to high school. It suggests the possibility that without more empirical systems of reckoning the world a reversal of the anthropomorphic occurs such that our behaviour becomes perfunctory.

Perfect Strangers curated by Blair French at the Centre for contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2000)