A super huge thank you to Karl, Tracey, Hayley and all the team at Pine Rivers Art Gallery for the opportunity to display my work Dress Shop Window Wonderland in their Window Gallery space for the month of February!
Dress Shop Window Wonderland, 2020, acrylic house paint and artist's paint on found evening dresses, fabric, string lights, armature wire, nylon and polyester thread
It was a pleasure to install the work with sculptor and teacher Karl De Waal. Thank you very much for your assistance with this project, Karl!
Dress Shop Window Wonderland is an installation work designed specifically for the Pine Rivers Window Gallery space. The installation draws on the codes and conventions of classic retail dress and department shop window installations and fuses these with the codes and conventions of visual art installation and the ball/school formal/prom. The resulting installation both draws the viewer in and, with a hint of the uncanny, raises questions about gender performance in contemporary society.
In my expanded painting practice, I use paint on readymade dresses and fabric to disrupt and reject conventional notions of the art object in the gallery setting. This subtly transgressive act is both perplexing and strangely alluring. By choosing to work with clothing, I also bring into play the concept of absence and presence: the absence of the wearer’s body is made uncannily obvious through the presence of the item of clothing. In other words, the dresses I use stand in for the women themselves.
Photo by Terry Memory