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


Louise Jennison
Southern Crowned pigeon (Goura scheepmakeri)
2011
drawing featured in the zine Five proud birds