Sutton Gallery is pleased to announce WorldWide Optimism, an exhibition of recent work from Auckland-based artist Sara Hughes. This body of work comes from Hughes’ continual interest in social environs in the digital age and the endless flow of information, combined with her investigation of use of colour as an economic tool.

Hughes’ recent series investigates the language of diagrams and data graphics, creating works that oscillate between visual image and visual information. The artist has lifted the title, WorldWide Optimism, from a recent media headline declaring renewed buoyancy in the stock market. She draws upon this sentiment and combines it with brightly painted saturated surfaces, to make a political statement on the current economic situation; inviting the viewer to negotiate the space between the works’ subject matter and their vibrant mode of presentation.

In this exhibition, paintings, works on paper and installation are bound together through their desire to articulate social meaning by utilizing aspects of optics and semiology. Two large works reference 1930’s Depression era ‘Grandmother Flower Garden’ quilt pattern in their use of honeycomb structure, also doubling as a grid with embedded data. Rainbow striped canvases incorporate facts and figures from the recent MasterCard Worldwide Index of Consumer Confidence. Drawing attention to consumer perceptions of economic conditions, the numbers point towards increased optimism but the candy colours hint at an artificial reality as do two target paintings titled Bubble and Burst.