Archives 1996 ()

3-13 December 1996

Sale | 13 December 8PM

12-25 November 1996

MASK is a simple construction of image and text. Their relationship to advertising imagery and portraiture is evident. 18 ’self’-portraits, each with a word held delicately in the mouth are displayed in a grid format within the entertainment section of a daily newspaper. The words describe various methods of cosmetic surgery. The gaze of each image is pointed directly yet indifferently at the reader. Within the context of assorted reviews announcements and advertisements, the intent of the work ambiguous. Neither the face of the white male nor the words themselves are immediately provocative. Yet drawing upon the associations between them, a disturbing, arresting and problematic equation emerges.

12 October - 12 November 1996

(Small Fortress Memories, 1991, Multiple Silver Print)

Artist Statement
In my work I deal with issues that personally touch my everyday life. These include: living in a rural environment; being a woman and an immigrant; reaching maturity; death of friends and family members; the joy of being alive and the frustrations of living in less than perfect society. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors born the generation after the war, I share survivor’s guilt, anger and acceptance over the collective loss of those murdered. As an artist, I try to use these experiences and transform them into a contemporary context.
I began thinking about my experience growing Czechoslovakia. Even though I have always known that my parents were interned in concentration camps and that both if their families were annihilated there, we never talked about those years in any detail. Those experiences indelibly changed my parents and their outlook on life and in turn affected what they taught me about the world. Even though I grew up watching war movies, it wasn’t until my adulthood when I read accounts of other Holocaust survivors, that I realized how little I really knew of what actually happened to my family. I wanted to know more. Once I realized how I’d like to present my parents’ stories I asked them to recollect what happened, not only for myself, but also as evidence against the revisionists who claim the Holocaust never happened. Adding to the collective memory seemed especially important in light of the recurring incidents of anti-semitism, racism and ethnic cleansing we are witnessing today.
The first results were two artists’ books 71125:Fifty Years of Silence and B-1126: Fifty Years of Silence, where my parents document their nightmarish years in concentration camps. In the course of working on these books I travelled to some of the concentration camp sites in order to understand what my parents were describing.I photographed the camp sites as they are today in order o use these images in the books, The books do not fully record the haunting memories those sites evoked I needed to try to describe my experiences at these sites. I created this body of photographic works to help others begin to realize the scale of the Holocaust.

5 September - 5 October 1996

(The construction of heterosexuality circa 1962)

Out Takes

‘Gender is a construction that regularly conceals its genesis: the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions.’
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge 1990

This work continues my explorations of gender as performance and my investigations into the family album. I remember being struck by how often I had seen within the faded fragments from the past representations of something familiar. Desire, supported by the collusion of hairdressers, clothes designers and high street photographers positioned a generation in the 1930’s and 40’s by their similarity to their chosen film start idols. Seductive, yet always tinged with a hint of failure, of pathos.
In this work I perform a variety of gender styles, from gangster and moll to spinster and pantomime dame to destabilize any notion of truth or falsity, to render genders thoroughly and radically incredible.
How can one individual encompass an interplay between desire and deficiency, youth and age? For each of us, how we tolerate knowing and not knowing, understanding and uncertainty in these unstable times? By first embracing the diversity within the self and then enjoying the diversity of others.

The Minefield of Memory: A Day In the Life of a Schoolgirl - Circa 1962
By Rosy Martin

Photo-therapy images by Rosy Martin in collaboration with Jo Spence.

The only image in my family album from my school years was the idealized icon of obedience, learning and achievement, meticulously staged by a school photographer. This photograph held pride of place in my parent’s home, as my mother kept the image of her dutiful daughter in her mind’s eye. Yet this image masks rather than reveals my experiences. So what was it like to be a teenager then at a time of transition, in “you’ve never had it so good” Britain?
I chose to re-stage my adolescence, since on reflection, it was a time when my identity was most in flux, influenced by and subject to the power of institutions: school, the communications industry, class dynamics and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ in which I either sought a ‘mirror’, or against which I rebelled. I was either actively colluding in or refusing the agendas set, testing our roles, taking up differing positions, and reacting to the agendas set, testing our roles, taking up differing positions, and reacting to the expectations expressed by others: my mother, father, teachers, middle-class peers, working-class friends, boys and a myriad of authority figures.
As a scholarship student at a very traditional academic-fixated school, where the stated aim was ‘to get as many “gels” as possible to Oxbridge’ (equivalent to the Ivy league Colleges), I was one of a selected few for whom education promised a means of escape in post-war meritocracy. But social mobility does not come so easy in British culture, deeply riven as it is with class divisions. As a working class girl in a middle class school I learnt the lesson that I was wrong: - in what I said, how I said it, how I looked, the values I’d been taught by my parents, even my voice was ‘wrong’. My anxiety, humiliation, fear, and shame became embodied - I stuttered, I could no longer speak, no longer form words. I, and my experience, was silenced. This separation from all that was familiar, this tearing up from the roots, this endless, repetitive lesson that I and the class from which I came were stupid, inferior, ignorant and shameful, has left deep psychic scars. Re-enacting this pain has formed part of my process to find my own voice.
I took up the image of the currently fashionable working class young woman in the evenings, partially as a denial of my academic abilities and in an attempt to re-connect with my working class friends. But this led not to escape, rather to a further set of limitations, constrictions and failures. Ironically I ended up looking more like a pastiche of my mother.
Since photographs are mimetic, it was important to provide a recognizable cultural and historical frame, that was specific to my story. My parents are hoarders, with ‘make-do-and-mend’ attitudes, having lived through the privations of two World Wars, and so I was able to find the actual make-up and clothes from 1962, and contemporary magazines. I found these objects very evocative: ‘Teenage spot cream’, ‘Angel face’ powder by Outdoor Girl, ‘Batwing’ eyelashes, ‘Vitapoint’ kirby grips, cotton wool stuffing for my circular stitched black bra, the ‘roll-on’, narrow-pointed stiletto-heeled shoes…
One of the aims of this work, for me as a lesbian (now) was to deconstruct my own heterosexual formation. I explored the ways in which sexuality is constructed at the level of culture and history through complex interaction. I also want to open up a dialogue with the heterosexual members of the audience - through memories, identification, and embarrassed amusement - and invite them to take risk of looking at their own positions and assumptions more critically.
Far from being externally fixed in some essentialist past, identities are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power. I have explored the subject as the site of the articulation of representation, inscriptions and meanings in the freedom of the potential offered by re-enacting, playing with and subverting identities, rather than seemingly being fixed, defined and contained by them. How do we learn to be who we may become?
Viewing a middle-aged woman contriving to replicate herself as a teenager adds a poignancy, as if layers have been peeled off to expose the social and psychic forces that went to make up the woman, re-inscribed on the body.
My feelings now are compassion for the me-of-15, as well as surprise at how easy to recall, how deeply ingrained were the skills I’d carefully learnt: - to create a ‘beehive’. apply those layers of make-up with such precision, get dressed in my armoury of containment, and learn how to present myself, ’sitting pretty’ or balancing upon one judiciously placed high-heeled show.
Unnatural, extra-ordinary, bizarre behaviour (here seen out of context), the rituals of an anthropological subject, learning to be gendered ‘object-of-the-male-gaze.’ the masquerade of learning how to present myself as a woman. That I chose then to replace my glasses, to see rather than be looked at, was already the clue: that I enjoyed creating the masquerade, but was ultimately more comfortable as an observer.

-Rosy Martin

5 July - 2 August 1996

A Gathering of Spirits Curated by Lisa Gabrielle Mark

Curatorial Statement:
I am interested in addressing the relationship between melancholy, (sadness, personal loss, pain, loss of faith etc.) and photography. There have been numerous exhibitions lately dealing with death and photography but none, to my knowledge, dealing with the specific relationship between the depressive state of melancholia and its representation through the mechanics of photography. The choice to focus on photography revolves around the ephemerality implicit in the medium, as well as its capacity to signify through a series of ‘punctum’ (which Roland Barthes discusses in his books Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes). All photographs are about loss — the death of a moment and the conditions which defined that moment. The very act of making art can be said to be counter-depressive; it is active and generative whereas the overriding aspect of severe depression is one of passivity, listlessness, apathy. The struggle of the artist to overcome a melancholic stasis in order to transform her/his experience into something which will resonate for others is a point of fascination for me.

“Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components — that is doubtless a way to curb mourning. To revel in it at times, but also to go beyond it, moving onto another form, not to scorching, more and more perfunctory… Nevertheless, art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing.” -Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

Rosalie Favell’s images represent momento mori, flowers and figures, some inscribed with text, others not. These objects suggest an overwhelming sense of loss that is startlingly personal, yet undeniably resonant. Favell uses a SX 70 Polaroid to make the original photo, which is the re-shot and enlarged. Her work makes use of the evocative capacity of photography and its connection to memory, as well as issues of loss and abandonment, (the origin of the word ‘eclipse’ is connected to abandonment).
The photograph becomes a kind of ’screen of memory’ (to lift a phrase from Rosalind Krauss). Meaning becomes generated less from what is actually represented (or ‘denoted’) than what tangential associations the images provoke. The photograph fills the hole left by the “lost Thing” that Kristeva speaks about, while at the same time articulating its dimensions, exploring its parameters.
The exhibition will consists of a book work which Favell has constructed of polaroid ‘memento mori’ images along with a series of large colour photographs. The book work is made out of cherry wood much like that of a coffin. The presentation of the works will be in a setting that is both private and intimate in order to allow the viewer the space for empathy and contemplation.

18 May - 15 June 1996

Curated by : Ray Cronin

Artist’s: Simon Glass, Sandy Groebner, Toni Hafkenscheid, Gaye Jackson, Brian Piitz, Leonard Schlichting, P. Elaine Sharpe, Jaclyn Shoub, Peter Sramek and Leslie Thompson

Photography enjoys a unique relationship with so-called ‘objective reality’ in the popular imagination. Photographs are always ‘documents’ it seems, perceived as recording rather than as representing (a fine distinction but telling one). This perception is flawed of course, and is usually held by viewers of the works rather than by the authors. It’s a kind of perceptual habit fostered by the omnipresence of a deluge of images which has become inevitable and benign. The awareness and exploitation of this perceptual habit serve as means to the poetic and polemic end of many artists including those in this exhibition.
I’m interested in the strategies that artists use to arrive at these ends, and in those employed by the ten artists included here, certain similarities are evident. In particular, the prevalence of staged imagery and the evocation of historical art forms. These works convey a knowledge of Western art history, adopting critical stances towards this received knowledge. The body, often the artists’ own, is a major element in all of the works included in this exhibition; a formal coherence that speaks to common influences and a common milieu, if not common experiences and concerns. In addition, these photographers all address the larger context of their medium, the ‘popular’ uses of photography outside of the gallery and museum systems. These works evoke popular culture at the same time as they do art history, and do so with a seamlessness that is perhaps unique to this medium.
Photography has come to have an ambiguous relationship to the real, to its subjects. Where once the relationship was perceived as a simple one between light, chemicals and paper, this simple response is closed to those of us who think critically about art and artworks (while it arguably remains the response of the so-called average viewer). This ambiguity is central to the works of the ten artists in this exhibition and to the conceptual strategies they use. “Persistent Documents” will pose questions about the nature of the photograph as document, and will ask how we look at photography, all of us: artists, critics, and other viewers.    Ray Cronin, Curator