Detail
Chinese restaurant in Xinjiang province : versions 1 and 2
In 2008 I was in Xinjiang province in the northwest of China. Xinjiang was the last province incorporated into modern China by Moa it was mainly full of farmer Muslims from the neighboring….stans they are called Uyghurs, or Uighurs or Uigurs pronounced wee-gars. The CCP is trying to breed out the Uyghurs by subsidizing Han (native Chinese ) Chinese to move to Xinjiang and take all the powerful jobs at the same time jailing (re-educating ) as many Uyghurs as they can without attracting too much criticism. The painting shows a Han Chinese business party at a traditional Uyghur restaurant. The Uyghur restaurant owner is carrying another sheep to be slaughtered for the Chinese through the restaurant, the sheep starts crying when it sees his family members on the plates of the Chinese business party – amixture of fear for himself and grief for his family.
related picture about the Olympic torch relay through Xinjiang on 2008
Cameron Hayes
The Olympic Torch Relay in Xinjiang Province, 2011
Oil on linen
80 x 80 inches
Photo: Bill Orcutt
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Marriage Cake
life is a choice between loneliness and vulgarity
The race to be the first celebrity: Jack The Ripper versus The Elephant Man – Australian Galleries, Sydney 3-22 Sept.
Cameron Hayes
The Race to Be the First Celebrity: Jack the Ripper versus the Elephant Man, 2011
Oil on linen
78 x 100 inches
Photo: Bill Orcutt
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
The race to be the first celebrity: Jack The Ripper versus The Elephant Man
The 1880s: Darwin had convinced most people in England that the process of
evolution meant the next generation would make their generation look like monkeys
in comparison. To prove their status and relevance, people in the 1880s were
determined to celebrate regressive rather than progressive character traits. They
wanted to celebrate the aspects of people that they considered backward and
regressive. People wanted to promote qualities in their fellow man that were
humiliating and anti-evolutionary, to inhibit the feeling of being surpassed
The local government replaced all the statues of heroes with statues of toilets, irons,
and vacuum cleaners. Everything inspirational was being replaced with the
acceptance of the debilitating filth of human mediocrity. In the afternoon, people lined
up along the driveway of the mental home to applaud the new patients forcibly being
dragged in, as well as outside the jails to view the violent criminals. They also line up
along the hospital driveway to watch those maimed in factory accidents crawl to the
hospital door. The trail of blood they left behind started the tradition of the red carpet
for celebrity arrivals.
Many formerly famous people have to make their achievements even more
spectacular to keep up with the new fashion of celebrities. Dr. Livingstone tried to
convince his audience that everybody and every animal he met on his adventures
were cannibals. He did this by starving baby animals and then stuffing the mother’s
skins with fresh meat. Soon lying and pantomime replaced discussion and history.
But the more emotionally and physically disabled they were, the more their celebrity status became
invincible. As more and more machines of the industrial age threateningly came torepresent to people that they were becoming evolutionarily obsolete, people became more attracted to those who were previously outcast: prostitutes, the exotic other, mental patients, criminals, and the physically impaired. The greatest celebrities of the age had to involve a combination of crime, mental illness, sin and prostitution: like the crime and mental illness of Jack the Ripper and the physical deformity and “nativeness” (mother squashed by an elephant) of The Elephant Man.
As a child the Elephant man was thought so shockingly grotesque that the only job
he was suited for was selling women’s stockings door to door.
A theme park called “The Elephant Man’s Mother” celebrated how Joseph Merrick
suffered without his mother’s milk (nature): children could buy elephant man masks,
head sacks and trinkets at the gift shop.
Great thinkers and achievers made people feel inadequate like old school friends
who have made it big. People blocked them out by filling their minds with the lives of
the needy and emotionally retarded: Karl Stefanovic, Alan Jones, Kardashians.
Images of great art were replaced by Instagram pics of restaurant meals.
Philosophical proverbs and heroic mottos were replaced by tweets about – well –
other tweets. Prostitutes (then) and skinny models (now) along with sexually ambigous radio hosts are symbols of nonreproduction, and, along with criminals, are celebrated as an affront to the next
generation to the certainty of evolution.
Ugliness becomes the new trend with dog baiting and talkback radio, adults toileting
and fighting in the streets to affirm their human / non-robot status. The ultimate
machine of the age – the clock – torments people by reminding them of an evolved
future of which they will not be part of and obliterating the past which they felt
superior to.
Darwin’s theory of evolution means babies are the masters of the next generation,
exploiting the adults’ fear that they would have to mutate to survive. Babies are
destroying the old London by driving steam train tracks through old buildings and
replacing trees in the parks with wooden chairs stacked in the shape of trees.
Mothers used long handled prams because they feared the violence of their pumpedup babies. Babies in top hats roam the streets looking to kill regressive human forms
and at the races shooting any non-winning horse.
The London zoo is the only sanctuary for the adults from the oppression of evolution.
The zoo animals in cages were confirmation that the adults weren’t the bottom of the
evolutionary ladder, the skin tight cages they put the animals in demonstrated the
adults’ superior freedom and intelligence, the wheels they put the cages on made it
possible and convenient for the adults to express their anger at the animals rather
than the system. Like Lord Curzon, Captain Cook and Gordon of Khatoum adults felt
it safer to concentrate on the individual not the system.
After everyone went blind, everyone was afraid they wouldn’t be able to remember what they now couldn’t see
After Everyone Went Blind, Everyone Was Afraid They Wouldn’t Be Able to Remember What They Now Couldn’t See
oil on linen
2 panels
overall size: 82 x 100 inches
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
After everyone went blind, everyone was afraid they wouldn’t be able to remember what they now couldn’t see. And everyone became overprotective of their memories and antagonistic towards any contradicting memories. When someone died everyone thought they should build the coffin in the shape of their memory of the dead person. Many corpses were torn apart in the fight for their right to their contradicting memories of the dead. Some grievers agreed on a compromise but had to squash or cut off parts of the hardening corpse to fit it into the compromised coffin shape.
Fingerprints and footprints became an important part of recording where you were and who you were when your memory failed you. The city became covered with fingerprints and footprints. And it became illegal to wash any surfaces. Because of this the world became an incubator of disease and then was ruled by disease. Also models had to be touched now instead of looked at and modelling became the most unglamorous job ever there was.
When people couldn’t see they became more aware and afraid of the things they could never see in the first place ; like radio waves, love and bacteria. Bacteria like Tibercle, Entamoebe and Bacilli became household names and there was even a petting zoo of bacteria.
Most people try to keep their memories through taste. They would have cake, soft drinks and lollies to remember their childhood, junk food to remember their teenage years and alcohol for the rest. They mainly became fat which wasn’t a big deal because no-one could see them anyway.
In the End Pavlov Saw Only Bells and Saliva
Cameron Hayes
In the End Pavlov Saw Only Bells and Saliva,
oil on linen, 2 panels
overall size: 82 x 100 inches
Photo: Hermann Feldhaus
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York
In the end Pavlov saw only bells and saliva
Pavlov proved that animals want to do as little thinking as possible. He proved animals will accept an easy substitute over something real but difficult. His dogs were satisfied with the sound of a bell, rather than looking for or fighting for food.
In his last years, Pavlov dreamed of a world where all people were trained to be satisfied with substitutes rather than real things.
Pavlov himself and everything he owned was always covered in saliva because when he rang his bells, all his laboratory animals became over-filled with saliva, as though they were feasting on a giant meal. Animals soon were happy to just only create and swallow their own saliva.
On National Science Day, Pavlov put on an exhibit of saliva and bells at Red Square. There was a parade of fit kiddies ringing bells to start the saliva sprinklers made from deers.
A dog fountain was made from putting food in dogs’ mouths and repeating the process after the food had fallen through the holes in the dogs’ throats into the saliva pool below.
There was an exhibit to show that animals will crave anything if they can suck it through an udder, and a race to demonstrate which part of the body reacts to an attractive woman.
Pavlov’s dodgy brother set up a stand claiming he could train the body to lose weight with the sound of a bell; he called himself Dr. Elephant Man.
Men gathered around to watch a mouse circle a pole and felt compelled to put money in bras tied up on a clothes line.
The top panel is Pavlov’s heaven where everything is made of hay, and the Russian police just ring a special bell to make you see brick, metal, and skin and feel happy, anxious, or sad.
What happens when pretend politicians pretend to be terrorists
What happens when pretend politicians pretend to be terrorists
Cameron Hayes
What Happens When Pretend Politicians Pretend to Be Terrorists, 2011
Oil on linen
66 x 136 inches
Photo: Bill Orcutt
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
In the week of the 2007 Australian federal election, it was clear that the Liberal Party were going to lose power to The Labor Party after 11 years in government. The electorate of Lindsay was made up of middle to lower earning white Australians with pockets of immigrants and first generation Australians from the Middle East.
The seat was held by Jackie Kelly for 11 years, but she was retiring and hoping to pass the seat onto a Liberal Party colleague, Karen Chijoff, on the Thursday before Saturday’s election. The husbands of Kelly and Chijoff were seen putting pamphlets in the Lindsay voters’ letter boxes.
The husbands had invented THE ISLAMIC AUSTRALIA FEDERATION. They printed pamphlets from this fake organization, thanking the Labor Party for seeking clemency for terrorists, building more mosques in Llndsay, and for supporting the Bali bombers. The husbands put the fake pamphlets in letterboxes in the poorest white areas.
This painting is about what happened in the local girl’s school and the local shopping mall when the white parents thought that the “Islamic Australia Federation” was targeting Lindsay to be an Islamic/Sharia enclave, with mosques on every corner, bombs in every bus shelter, and most frightening, women with scarves on their heads. The white fear of Lindsay becoming Islamic spread to the schools and made the most vulnerable (Muslim girls) the most accountable for the fear. The Muslim girls already in semi-denial were forced to completely deny their identity.
They had to leave home in traditional dress and change at bus stops and the shopping mall, semi-naked in front of predatory white men – cleaners, gardeners, and business men. The girls had to hunt around shopping malls for the cheapest possible versions of non – Muslim dress: singlet tops, short shirts, high heels, and brand names. While their parents, particularly their fathers, did laps at the mall, anti-clockwise, oblivious to the children’s struggle.
Once the girls had given up their identity and started to desire to be someone else, they became nothing and extremely vulnerable to drugs, alcohol, boys, and brands.
cameronkhayes 
When you lie you lose a bit of yourself and replace it with a bit of everyone else AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES SYDNEY SEPT. 3 – 22
WHEN WE LIE WE LOOSE A BIT OF OURSELVES AND REPLACE IT WITH EVERYONE ELSE
At a funeral it is the custom to lie about the dead person and his/her life to the extent it’s no longer possible to identify the body. Even after death we live a lie.
Cameron Hayes
When You Lie You Loose a Bit of Yourself and Replace it with a Bit of Everyone Else, 2016
oil on linen
60 x 72 inches
photo: Vince Ruvolo
courtesy the artist and Ronald Felmdan Gallery, New York
.
A woman reads from a prepared eulogy- nothing lies like a eulogy – the mourners listening to it are trying to make sense of its parts and are trying to re-assemble the dead body is like trying to put together an IKEA table but they are confused by the contradictions and implausibility of the life they were hearing about and the life they thought they knew . Above them a couple sit exasperated holding an allen key and IKEA directions to a table with pieces that don’t look like they belong to a table.
In the centre of the picture there is a marriage cake, both bride and groom have already taken pieces out of the wedding cake and replaced the pieces with other bits of cheaper cake to hide their theft. For the sake of the wedding the couple walk down the isle already missing pieces of themselves in an attempt to accommodate their partner. The bride’s leg is replaced by a bike wheel her arm is a crutch, the grooms head a rubbish bag. The bridal gown’s train catches bits of the couple as they walk and two groomsmen trail behind with wheelbarrows to collect and reattach the couples missing bits
marriage cake
Some people lie so much that they become empty sacks – scarecrows. Their loved ones hunt around with lie detectors trying to find the lost bits of them in an attempt to refill real parts of them back into life. A giant public lie detector is used by many desperate people who dance around the lie detector in adoration with personal objects wired to it that they know wont lie to them ; pet rabbit, pot plant, golf club…ect..
A man with his pants down is thrown out of what looks like a public toilet, only to realize the cubicals are selling computers and the toilets are computers. Dogs are also fooled into thinking what looks like a park is a park- it is really a plant shop. A pet shop is made to look like a police station, market research is made to look like a school and a bed and furniture shop is made to look like a hospital. The beauty shop looks like a church with statues of Mary and Jesus replaced with six packed models .Art museums are fronts for gift shops. Even buildings are actively lying.
Loose bits of people are clogging up the streets and garbage men use people’s empty outsides as bin bags to clean up the mess, they throw the body bags into the dump truck and take the bits of people to the bucket factory. At the bucket factory bits of people are melted into plastic and moulded into empty plastic buckets so they can re-roam the streets waiting to be filled with lies and deceit. People are born as originals and die as copies
“By a lie a man annihilates his dignity as a man” – Kant. At the job interview applicants are seated in front of giant posters of shapes they are expected to fit into ,they are given the waiting time to self-mutilate so as to fit the required shapes they loose and gain body parts while trying not to drop the CV’s they brought from the lobby vending machines. Those long term unemployed have no uninjured parts of their body left and only their heads emerge from their bandaged bodies rolled around on wheelchairs
“There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity” – Schopenhauer .In the background cars are dressed up as aeroplanes – the lies we tell ourselves about the things we are going to do. The cars drive to the ethnic restaurants to who’s countries we will lie about going to and then to films who’s books we will lie about reading. Also in the background are cardboard skyscrapers populated by a single angry man with a computer who tells himself 1. That he has something important to say and 2. That everyone will agree with him if only they understood him. These skyscrapers have names like ; The Institute of… and The Coalition for …. and The Committee for…. and The People Against…..