Output details

The Women

Solo exhibition.

Solo exhibition 'The Women' is the result of a research project to explore issues of gender and identity. The resulting solo exhibition references paranoid gothic texts, costume, and gender definition to interrogate the power play of relationships. Repetition and mirroring are tactics employed throughout to highlight the anxiousness that accompanies looking and being looked at. Duty and desire, devotion and decadence are revealed in The Women through a collection of screen prints, collage, drawing and sculpture which together act as a framing device for a series of 8 short films. The show as a whole explored changes of gender, dressing up, preparation before public display, and the monotony of social constructs (specifically gender specific social constructs). Mirrors were presented as ‘other’ objects, operating as a crown, a moon & a phallus rather than as a reflection of self. This misappropriation of form acted to undermine a feminine, narcissistic relationship with reflection and the permanent inability to escape it (due to the city’s shop windows, glass buildings & so on). The ‘mirrors’ in The Women were not reflective - they didn’t work.

Interrogating Judith Butler’s assertion that we are always in drag, the exhibition as a whole operated to place the viewer ‘back stage’, both actually and psychologically. The installation reveals the daily self-conscious staging of the public persona. Of particular focus was the complex business of female gender construction via clothing and mannerisms (where the mannerisms are manifest in the differing voices available in the texts and in the consistent references to mirror use).