Author: S.T. Lore
Client: Y3K / World Food Books
Designer: Joshua Petherick
Pages: 24
Format: Softcover Ring-bound, 210 x 150 mm, Edition of 100
Year: 2010
"Of the poster, little is known, beyond the formal dimensions. Measuring 120 by 100 centimetres, slightly ripped and torn at one edge, this numbered edition 1/1 includes the artist’s own initials — VA — scrawled haphazardly in the right-hand corner. By all accounts, this original airbrush print was dredged up during the 2005 demolition of local Art-deco horror cinema The Odeon. Found sealed away in a cardboard tube with other discarded movie poster designs — for POSSESSION (1981) with Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani and for NEXT OF KIN (1982) with John Jarrett — this one-off hand produced edition was apparently commissioned for a never-released science fiction movie entitled: A GOLDEN BREED (1987).
Pushing aside his scant belongings (a shoebox, a string bag of oranges, a thin foam mattress) Oliver Hextall reaches out with his long and artistically elegant fingers to re-examine the work. Despite the condition of the poster, the imagery retains the same powerful and technically flawless composition. Expressionistic colours blend seamlessly with realistic portraiture to create a mysterious, hypnotic backdrop. Backlit by the malefic circle of a rising sun, under a sky streaked by weird stretchy clouds, titanic buttresses of rock shelter a crescent shaped sandy beach. Devoid of any trees or the peaceful shapes of Pacific birds, ocean waves crash into the base of a large stone in the centre of the beach. Carved with a multitude of pregnant figures (long-limbed beings with rounded bellies and pointed teeth) this totemic sculpture is surrounded, on all sides, by a strange array of hundreds of egg-shaped orbs.
By far the largest figure inside the poster is the magnificent portrait of the wild-eyed woman. Airbrushed into the foreground, half-turned in profile, her eyes are pinned by intractable pupils as her left arm clutches a blunt medieval weapon. The dynamic posture clearly establishes a moment separated from a longer string of action, as her sandalled feet occupy a ruin of fragments shattered from a nearby orb. In the distance, under a rock cornice, a priestly looking figure raises his arm before a sheltered army of longhaired soldiers as they prepare to launch forward a momentous beach assault. A dark drip of blood clings to the woman’s headband as she stares defiantly outward: with one eye fixed on the viewer and one eye fixed on them ..."
