INNOCENCE FOR GOODNESS SAKES! Innocence™ is a strategic advertising campaign running in Melbourne from May 2004 to January 2005. It has received a $25,000 grant from Arts Victoria and is an ambitious and extensive project that uses billboards press, talkback radio and product launches to examine brand culture and commodfication. The project is headed up by the model Shelly Innocence. Shelly uses her promotional skills to market an intangible range of products that include Happiness™, Integrity™ and Honesty™. Shelly’s infamous website (shellyinnocence.com) has already received 200,000 hits. Her Public Happiness Booth stood in the plaza of Flinders Street Station until August, providing daily Happiness readings for the population of Melbourne. The billboards were up until the end of July. Innocence™ is a wilful engagement by artists with the consumable fictions created by photographic image, advertising and commerce. Innocence™ seeks to reinvest meaning, or make visible the lack of meaning, in a dialogue so saturated with photographic image that the content of such images has paradoxically become invisible. Shelly Innocence was born in 1970, in Gladstone, Queensland. She breezed through a certificate 4 in Retail Management at Gladstone University of Technology before climbing the corporate ladder. She is now a celebrity, a supermodel and a world-class athlete. She is also a woman created by advertising. She does not actually exist, but because she appears on billboards and has a website and a fan club many people think she is real. She is the ultimate consumable fiction. She is beautiful, vacuous and full of inane insights which she is only too happy to share. Her motto is ‘only believe’. Her creator, Peter Burke, delights in events that play on the border between fiction and reality. On New Years Eve 1999 one of his characters, Dr Clarence Chan, distributed 2000 Millennium Pills to the people of Melbourne and in doing so, averted the potentially devastating effects of the Y2K virus. Peter Burke’s art exists on the street and is concerned with popular culture, the media and everyday life. His interest in the tabloid newspapers led him to create his own newspaper Pedestrian Times, which entertained thousand of commuters at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. Between 2000 and 2003 he created his own headlines and posted them up around the Melbourne CBD. Such headlines as ‘Bin nite tonite’ and ‘Man feels cold’ celebrate the small events of life and make people laugh. Peter Burke has a Master of Fine Arts from Victorian College of the Arts. He teaches art and design at Victoria University. Shelly’s celebrity can be attributed to the devoted attention and hard work of people like Cath Barcan, Sue Moss, Robin Hely, Mandy Morgan and Julie Hunt. Each of these talented women are instrumental in making sure her motto ‘only believe is on the lips of each and every one of her devoted fans. Keep the dream alive? Rex Turnbull Lino Magazine Issue no.7 2004