Using illustrations from a technical manual of the 1940s `the author examines the working male figure in popular iconography focusing on masculine representation in the visual arts and its link to the means of production.
In 1992, Helen Moyes made a documentary 'The Back Yard Shed' which set out to look at the lives of a cross-section of Australian households through the phenomenon of the back-yard shed.
Social documenter Maxx Image is obsessed with the colour purple. Black leather is the costume of rebellion and the thrill and valour expounded by such an ideal could be seen as enticing accessories to the passion and zeal of leather sexuality.
Exhibition review Tradition, Cloth, Meaning: Contemporary Textiles Curated by Sara Lindsay
17 September - 7 October 1995
Long Gallery Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Tasmania
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.
Polish born Krystyna Petryk has long been fascinated with portraiture and representations of the nude in photography. Her own investigations began in Warsaw by photographing her pregnant friends and continued after her arrival in Western Australia in 1982. Once here she broadened her explorations to include both male and female subjects before shifting to photograph and research representations of men exclusively.
Masculinity continues its argument with itself, quizzical at its self-propelled self-assertion. But in asserting aggression the pain is not just experienced in the victim. For even in the crudest acts of coitus, for a moment, the raper becomes the raped, he is tied by his penis and his balls into an abomination.