IT'S
A GIRL'S WORLD
Elizabeth Boyce, Kate Cotching, Gracia Haby, Louise Jennison
Temple Studio, Prahran, Melbourne
Artistic practice, existing as a reflection of wider society, has been
exploring issues of feminism and it's changing status over the course
of the last century. As we rapidly approach the millennium, the younger
generation are exploring their identity as individuals and as a part
of culture as a whole. It could almost be seen as a sociological study,
to place four young women similar in age, from diverse locations, varying
cultural and social influences in the one educational institution, and
monitor what influence location and gender has on their individual artistic
expression. The four artists exhibiting in the show it's a girl's world
present an intriguing cross section of issues and ideas in relation
to cultural production.
Louise Jennison's work generation X girl living life to the pepsi
max! is a hyperreal digital imaged portrait that slickly presents
a commentary on the construction of feminine identity. Using authentic
objects personally selected by the subject, Jennison constructs an image
that recreates a space that gives insight into the gen X girl and her
world. The information is true in the sense of the real is subverted
in the fact that the work is staged, and removed from it's genuine context.
Jennison's work mocks the construction of popular culture imagery utilising
its own dialogue.
Landscapes, and more specifically sunsets, have been utilised in the
course of art history as a metaphor for an emotional state of being.
Kate Cotching lulls us into a sense of relaxation with her wall piece,
striking a chord of recognition with the anonymous landscape. Cotching
then proceeds to back flip and subverts the very state of mind we idealise
as we slowly identify the initially ambiguous silhouette to be a violent
manoeuvre between two figures. We laugh, as we do at all popular culture
images of violence in order to expel our horror, and then the landscape
image overrides and we are lulled back into submission. The reverse
wall installation has a playful element of figures travelling in the
one direction across the wall, climbing and descending in an almost
lyrical manner. The images of conflict become visually pleasurable,
glossed landscapes of serenity, and then oscillate back to the reality
of the shape.
In approaching the wall a mass rhythmic shapes become recognisable as
envelopes. Elizabeth Boyce manipulates the exhibition space in a manner
indebted to the rhetoric of Minimalism. Instead of using works that
are merely void of meaning, Boyce's envelopes are suspended and hover
close to the ceiling and, are, remain ambiguous. Our eyes follow the
floating blue mass to the point where it descends down the wall and
enters the viewers space. The seemingly generic objects associated with
both communication and office work, are opened out, exposing a patterning
of blue aeroplanes in the internal page. In Boyce's installation, the
initial formal aspects of the work, become only a part of the reading,
with the obvious pun becoming apparent.
Gracia Haby uses objects and images that resonate with personal, subjective
and universal experiences. Her installations are loaded with images
from her life, contrasted and complemented with that of anonymous individuals,
they become documentation of experiences that are either constructed
or exist only in the memory. Simultaneously, her work speaks of objects
collected as tokens of experience and are secondary to the function
they serve in recalling a state of mind. The objects become obscured
by the visual and emotional experience, and can be compared to the function
that individual words perform as part of a text.
As a whole, the four artists' works give a diverse range of ideas and
issues, working in various media, and simultaneously composes an image
of the interests of young women artists working around Melbourne. The
strength of the show, it's a girls world, lay not merely in the quality
of the individual artists and their expressions, but in the sense that
locality and gender are issues that are vital to artists in the broader
context. Gender in particular can never be denied as influence, but
as we are heading towards the 21st century, much feminist discourse
has been accepted by the wider society. Young women artists, including
Louise Jennison, Kate Cotching, Elizabeth Boyce and Gracia Haby are
empowered by an increased profile and status and the ability to not
be disregarded merely because of their gender.
As we are always told, Good girls (great exhibition).
Georgia Cribb, 1998
