We collage, genderbend, cross dress and polymorph exquisite corpses out of media and advertising personalities, then use them as fantasy aids in the cause of our mundane desires.
Since 1927, the idea that the motor cycle is synonymous with assertive and unmediated masculinity has been enlarged and expanded through a broad range of visual, literal and cinematic imagery to the point where a machine which was once acclaimed as a means of transport has been transformed into a gendered cultural icon, an object of and for masculine display.
During World War Two, the Australian government's Department of Information represented the male body in at least two distinct ways. The photographer Edward Cranstone photographed a heroically active, phallicised body and the cameraman Damien Parer filmed a heroically suffering abject body.
Let's speak about nomads and farmers... The acrid vapours that fill the cast iron nooks and crannies by day: the trickles on metal that appear in my black and white slides each night like blood from a more visible crime: this evidence of the distillation of men: these signs are signs enough of the collapsing consequences of 'farming'.
Exhibition review Home: Body
Pat Brassington, Kathryn Faludi, Mary Scott, Heather B Swann, Jennifer Spinks
21 September - 13 October 1995
Carnegie Room Town Hall Hobart, Tasmania
Exhibition review Tradition, Cloth, Meaning: Contemporary Textiles Curated by Sara Lindsay
17 September - 7 October 1995
Long Gallery Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania