Liberace’s Closet
July 23 - August 3, 2003
“If everyone was a little bit like Liberace, the world would be a better place!”
– Shari Hatt
Photographer Shari Hatt brings her most recent work to Galerie Trois Points, 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 was created in cooperation with the prestigious Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. 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.
Hatt’s portraits reflect on Liberace’s gender-fluidity, his appeal to the middle-aged ladies he resembled veiled his private homosexuality. The glittering façade of this showbiz legend challenges our continued fascination with the private lives of the very famous.
Also featured in the exhibition is Hatt’s photographic series: 52 men in my bedroom (1993), a deck of playing cards featuring Montreal men. Shari Hatt is a photo-based artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia who 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 the US since 1993. Hatt has received a number of fellowships, scholarships and grants, including the Celanese Canada Internationalist Fellowship (1998) and the Duke and Duchess of York Photography Prize (2001). The Liberace Museum, Douglas Coupland, The Art Bank of the Canada Council, The Banff Centre for the Arts, The Cygnet Foundation and Museum London have recently acquired her work for their collections.