This series of large-scale colour photographs showcase details of Liberace’s onstage wardrobe, attire overlaid with couture quality embellishments that take on fantastic proportions. A gifted working class performer who reinvented himself as an object of adoration for millions of fans, Liberace set the bar for conspicuous consumption, equating success with excess but never without a sense of generosity and humour. Hatt’s portraits reflect on Liberace’s gender-fluidity. His appeal to the middle-aged ladies he resembled veiled his private homosexuality. The glittering façade of this showbiz legend explores our fascination with the private lives of the very famous.

Amy Karlinsky of the Winnipeg Free Press writes: “Hatt’s cleverness is not just in the re-presentation of Liberace’s dazzling style, but in the viewer’s mimicry of excessive consumption in the act of looking. Realism. Realism. Oh, the world, in such an immediate, material, and pleasurable vastness!”

Douglas Coupland, artist and author of Generation X says: “(Hatt’s photographs)… are brilliant and they really challenge notions of personality, identity, gender, sexuality, capitalism and you-name-it. You can’t imagine the lightning storms in my brain when I entered the gallery!”