My Collection  

Fiona Hall / Australia b.1953 / (Mobile telephone) (from ‘The price is right’ series) 1994 / Polaroid photograph on paper / 84 x 56cm; 71 x 53cm (comp.) / Purchased 1995 under the Contemporary Art Acquisition Program with funds from John Potter and Roz MacAllan through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Fiona Hall

Fiona Hall
(Mobile telephone) 1994

Not Currently on Display

(Mobile telephone) belongs to Fiona Hall’s ‘The price is right’ series in which she transforms ordinary objects in order to analyse the relationship between nature and culture, exploring themes such as environmentalism, globalisation and consumerism.

‘The price is right’ series groups mobile phones and pill packets with soft drink cans and Buddhist icons through large-format Polaroid photographs that call upon the aesthetics of advertising and consumer culture. The title of the series is taken from a popular 1990s Australian game show that rewarded contestants who were able to place objects in the closest to correct order of their relative value. Hall’s works from this series consolidate a theme endemic to late twentieth century life: the search for meaning in a world where design and technology have prioritised convenience and mass consumption.

Fiona Hall was born in 1953 in Sydney, where she studied painting at the National Art School in the early to mid 1970s. Later that decade, she worked in London as an assistant to British photographer Fay Godwin before relocating to New York, where she graduated in 1982 with a Master of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.

Since the early 1990s, Hall has exhibited in mixed media, particularly the innovative use of metals, including low relief, cutting, shaping and knitting. She transforms ordinary objects in order to analyse the relationship between nature and culture, exploring themes such as environmentalism, globalisation and consumerism.

Hall undertakes major public commissions and projects that embrace a range of media, and has increasingly engaged with themes of ecology, history and the effects of globalisation. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and was the country’s representative at the Australian Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with the installation work Wrong Way Time 2012–15.