This was a large – that is to say it filled even the EAF’s sometimes seemingly cavernous space – two piece installation. The viewer entered first a kind of antechamber (Strawberry Girl) filled with arrangements, vanity-mirror-style, of cutely girlish objects & surrounded by pink & white illustrative images of a ‘type’ of sexuality that seemed to morph from David Bailley, sentimentalized soft-porn to a more aggressive, punkish & androgynous perversity & provocation. Decor turning scornful.<\/p>\n
The larger installation (The White Room – which had been one of the five works chosen for last year’s Contempora 5 exhibition in Melbourne) was a room within a large circular walled enclosure. A secluded, private room within a protective walled moat of white gravel (three tons of marble chip) & stretched gauze curtain. One entered the round outer wall (having found the gap) & crunched across the gravel around the all-white, circular maze – white walls, white mesh, white gravel: a very artificial, insulated purity, slightly sci-fi. But also, given the themes that seemed latent – the ‘enclosed garden’ metaphor for female sexuality, a satin, Elvis-in-Las Vegas sumptuous sexuality associated with the all-white environment, the feel that one might be the encroaching voyeur, the threatening (male) other as one crunched along in search of the inner room’s entrance, or like a participant on a police search – a site of surprise. One might find some sexual act, or a murdered body. The inner site suggested, with its white, padded walls, kinky boudoir as much as padded cell, some private, ritualized confrontation: power & pleasure – as illicit, shameful, merely private, as mercenary transaction.<\/p>\n
A third aspect of the exhibition was a small video playing in the gallery toilets, mounted high like a security camera. Its small screen showed a young woman in that same padded room, the camera hand-held & focusing on various empty corners & lines of the room & occasionally, accidentally, on parts of the woman. It seemed an unwilling & uncooperative complicity on the woman’s part. My thought was that the exhibition successfully re-projected normally internalised feelings (of ambivalent recklessness\/worthlessness\/victim-hood\/assertive autonomy etc.,) back onto the viewer.<\/p>\n
Original Text: http:\/\/pandora.nla.gov.au\/pan\/15317\/20090716-0050\/www.eaf.asn.au\/1998\/fabyc.html<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was a large – that is to say it filled even the EAF’s sometimes seemingly cavernous space – two piece installation. The viewer entered first a kind of antechamber (Strawberry Girl) filled with arrangements, vanity-mirror-style, of cutely girlish objects & surrounded by pink & white illustrative images of a ‘type’ of sexuality that seemed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabyc.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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