(Mixed media installation with single-channel video)
Silk-screen print, silk and cotton textile, constructed underwear, 3D animation – format: single-channel DV video (looped)
It’s complicated to unravel questions surrounding how persons in the sex trade are viewed and how they may view themselves in terms of commodity. There’s a simple transactional agreement and setup in a “live” Peep Show where a voyeur is drawn into a booth after purchasing to gaze upon the nude person inside. In the installation PEEPSHOW, the staging is balanced, and the voyeur who has “paid” for the power and privilege of the gaze becomes watched simultaneously by the subject of desire inside the booth, altering the gaze into one that is shared.
The theatre dressing and drapes in the installation, produced with screen print on flat cloth appear to recede into folds yet they do not penetrate the surface acknowledging that the sex worker is gazed upon, but not physically encountered. The illusion of the “folds” moreover proposes mysteries “not seen or known” in the undercurrent of the sex industry, the erotic urging of the voyeur, and the narrative behind the sex worker.
Author and visual art-textile lecturer, Pennina Barnett best conveys the multidimensional comparison of cloth as a metaphor while exploring subjectivity in culture and identity, she writes: “The poetics of cloth are composed of folds, fragments and surfaces of infinite complexity […] the surface is a liminal space both inside and out, a space of encounter.¹
On another note, PEEPSHOW bears witness to our cultural fixation on female breasts, the 3D animation inside the booth attempts to re-establish and retrieve a part of oneself lost in childhood – to perhaps seek a sense of “wholeness.” It’s within this context the eyes on the breast represent “the gaze” which goes both ways, such as an infant staring unwaveringly from beginning to the end at a mother’s face during breastfeeding as she peers back.
1 Pennina Barnett, (1999) Folds Fragments and Surfaces: Towards a Poetics of Cloth, in Textures of Memory: the Peotics of Cloth, Nottingham: Aupel Row Gallery. p. 28
PEEPSHOW
(Mix media installation with video)
Silk-screen print, silk and cotton textile, constructed underwear.
3D animation – format: single-channel DV video (looped)
