| Simone Slee, Amanda
Ahmed and Megan Marshall |
1st
Floor Gallery |
| Having completed their art courses and exhibited in Melbourne the work of Amanda Ahmed, Simone Slee and Megan Marshall at 1st Floor Gallery takes the form of a conversation. A clue to the artists' respective works is to be found in the collaborative piece Tainted Love in which tissue was sculptured into flowers and stuck on the wall progressively throughout the course of the exhibition. As a work in flux Tainted Love captures the collective concern with its idea of process and physicality. Rather than being disguised, process became eliminatory. | |
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Whilst the works negate strict definition, room is
made for a theoretical and an art historical reading. The
three artists in this show offer ways out of thinking the
sexualised binaries of visual culture. According to Psychoanalysis, subjectivity is articulated in terms of spaces and physical boundaries - of a fixing of limits of corporeality. Likewise, art has traditionally been defined in terms of contained from and experience. In each of these artists' work, notions of subjective and aesthetic closure are challenged by sculptural objects whose overt pleasure in productive processes testifies to the fluidity and pliability of specifically female corporeality. |
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Telling absent in the exhibition are any figurative
representations of, or literal allusions to the
traditional modes of representing the female body.
Instead, Ahmed's abstract scourers, Marshall's plastic
sacks and Slee's tissue sculpture stand-in as ciphers of
female embodiment. As phantom bodies whose visual power
exists as much in the materials and processes used by
each artist, the works refuse any understanding of female
corporeality as inert, fixed, passive and biologically
determined. Pattern procedure and metaphor take the place
of objective form and subjective stasis. As theory verifies, the political and historical questioning of meaning, subjectivity and power, is also a problem for aesthetics. The work of Ahmed plays with the notion of the gallery wall and its desire to limit and frame. Her scourers provide a rough edge to the clinically neutral white-zone of the gallery and its attendant masculine discourses, while Marshall's transparent plastic sacks make it errantly bulge. The lightweight formlessness evident Slee's sculpture (a reference to Eva Hesse's work remade in jeweller's tissue and cotton thread) works the traditions of renegade modernist like Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Patriarchy's understanding of the female body as Other, as the object, the solid and definite thus returns in this exhibition as indefinite, unstable, fluid and blurry. The emphasis on process and materials attests to the artists' desire to reconfigure knowledges and technologies and to produce ambiguous spaces full of erotic absurdity and discomfort. Lucy Elliott |
