Mouths of Illusion: Beyond The Machine gathers original poetic texts, videos, sculptures and soundscapes to critique, and perhaps transcend, our constructed, commodified mental and language universe called ‘identity’.

Compiled over 9 years by artists Nick Frost and Nick Kealey and first shown at the 2020 NZ Fringe Festival, the work speaks of Manufactured Optimism - our relentless narrative of want in bright-brave utopias of ‘choice’ fanned by sensory-emotive-mental lures of instant commodification, where identities are fabricated in gratified automatising soundbitey therapy mantras out of big-brother faces in ever-subtler loops of self-hypnosis!

Massive Discontent is the result - the ogre of untapped shadows, upwellings of doubt, wounded satires of fragmentation, soul’s dark night of victimisation, ironic turnings and scams: the diminishing returns of the totalising project of modern rationalism.

Finally, It’s Up To You - to birth responsibility, refuge, catharsis, sanity - in ageless truths or koans where the materialist, polarising, judging ego-mind dissolves to ‘here-now-this awareness’, where experiencer and experience are one, beyond paradigms of subject-object, name and form, time, space, flux, cause, birth, death. Our Machine - a porridge of postmodernist deconstruction, lyric poetry, Lacanian psychology, satiric pop art and the alienating sludge of internet culture - speaks of obsessive labelling, object-making and media regurgitation in the desire-disillusion Life Wheel born of our basic ‘self-other’ delusion.

Beyond the Machine - though elusive, points to spontaneity, surprise, joy, transparency, coolness, borderless freedom, oneness.

In summary... an overweening jumble of affirmations, images and faces evokes the dominance of language and image according to the externalising, symbolising, judging medium of mentality, of ‘atomised, commodified, false knowledge’. Yet mantras are also a sword of deconstruction and detachment, of satire, an in-your-face call to witness all our ‘me-it visions of identity’. As we walk mental forests of unexamined, rigid, circular, narcissistic self-alienations, a random item or phrase or gesture may spark enquiry into the presence of a hidden Real: that is, ‘ourself as borderless wholeness, as elusive flow’. We thereby sift a bit of gold - or take a chance to talk with our hosts... letting the installation become an unlikely temple for communication.

Saturday 1 March 2025 until Saturday 15 March 2025. 15 days, every day, 10am until 9pm. 

Free entry. Hosted. 

Creatives Bio

Mouths of Illusion: Beyond the Machine multi media Installation Personnel:

Nick Frost: www.mouthsofillusion.com
Sydney writer, composer, video artist, actor, sculptor.

Nick Kealey: www.mouthsofillusion.com 

New Zealand video artist, sculptor, visual artist, actor, composer.

Dan Potra: www.danpotra.com
Sydney and international graphic and conceptual designer.

Gabrielle Gazal: www.odp.com.au
Publicity manager and director, Open Door Productions, Sydney.