The artwork “Happy Face Advantage” by Cobie Ann Moore explores the ugliness of ‘forced happiness’ and the requirement in contemporary society for people to always appear positive, especially those with disability. This requirement to be happy is heightened by both social media and the growing tendency to ‘medicate sadness’.
“I always felt the pressure to appear happy even before my accident but as a person with a spinal cord injury I feel a constant pressure to have a positive attitude so people don’t view me as broken or defeated by my injury. In contemporary society there is a growing attitude that ‘if I’m not always happy there must be something fundamentally wrong with me’.” – Cobie Ann Moore
The artwork Happy Face Advantage was exhibited in a group exhibition ‘Ugly’ which was a showcase of work exhibited in the Ideas Platform at Artspace in July 2018. The artists involved were participants in the Emerge ’17 program, an engagement project developed by Front Up, an arts and culture hub founded by Ability Options, which connects professional artists and emerging practitioners living with disability.