To the Citizens of Paradise was conceptualised as a response to the exodus of urban inhabitants to idyllic regional locations, in the wake of COVID-19. As towns swell, commercial development is accelerated. And this multidimensional work is an entreaty to these new neighbours to embrace a perspective of locality – biosphere and village culture - over notions of convenient consumerism.  

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As this particular example (the Civic Centre expansion on the Sunshine Coast) exhibits, inserting mass consumerism into paradise ultimately erases its qualities and reconfigures them into a homogenised ideal of the ‘best life’. A QR code actions the viewers’ phone to a video that makes this temporal transformation palpable. At the same time, Paradise can be perceived as the natural world, in which case the work implicates us all as ‘Citizens’.