Endless Summer: Sunglasses and the spectacle of vision

Lily Hibberd

Gertrude Studio Artist Lily Hibberd’s solo exhibition, Endless Summer, chronicled one man’s obsession with sunglasses. The exhibition consisted of a sequence of portraits of the man wearing his collection of sunglasses, in which each of the 37 images is the same except he’s wearing a different pair – one for every summer of his life. For this exhibition, the gallery space was constructed as a viewing experience with two floor-to-ceiling tinted acrylic panels that could be looked though like lenses, as an altered perceptual experience akin to wearing a pair of spectacles. A voice-over accompanied the installation, with the man recollecting his summers past as he tries on each pair. Twentieth century fashion and celebrity culture have made sunglasses into revealing embodiments and representations of human desire. Hibberd’s work set up a comparison between sunglasses, photography and vision, exploring the implications of lens and framing, as well as the varying capacities of each to contain time, and memorialise.

Hibberd’s exhibition Endless Summer looked at the psychological and cultural aspects of sunglasses, focusing on them as objects and instruments of altered perception, from both sides of the lens.