calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/1/2003

Sandra Bermudez

Generous Miracles Gallery, New York

Wallpaper

Sandra Bermudez's installation, Wallpaper, fits snugly within the informal category of contemporary girlish art, and as is true of most of this style of art, lying underneath an easy-access surface of tongue-in-cheek sweetness is a good dose of perversion. But it's perversion with a point. In Bermudez's work playfulness and seduction are a means to crack open clichés of the feminine.

To start with, there is the bubble-gum colored paper that covers the walls of the installation space. The unmistakable gendered baby pink and blue gives the feeling of having inadvertently stumbled upon a nursery. But instead of the customary ducklings or sugarplum fairies, the patterned prints are made up of miniature portraits of the artist photographed nude in suggestive (albeit a bit outdated) poses. Serialized and reduced, her image is arranged in ornate patterns that recall the lavish choreography of the 30's and 40's MGM musical extravaganzas, where swimming mermaids a la Esther Williams or swirling chorus girls -shot from bird's eye view- form kaleidoscopic configurations resembling animated flowers.

Upon closer look, however, one cannot help but notice that there is something odd and even creepy about the female figure rendered in the wallpaper. Nipples, navel, vagina and all other natural orifices have been erased from the body. The female figure is transformed into a smooth closed surface, a self-contained and ultimately sterile body where nothing flows, no milk, no menstrual blood. All looks and no touch, an island in itself, the body is rendered incapable of coupling with other bodies, and of procreating. As if reversing Deleuze and Guattari's logic , Bermudez presents the viewer with the ultimate un-productive and un-desiring machine. Here the artist takes a long history of the representation of the female figure to its ultimate consequence.

In conversation with the artist, she pointed out that while conducting research in early pornography, she discovered that parts of the female body were routinely brushed away. This obvious visual sterilization of the female figure by rudimentary techniques during the turn of the 19th century has continued to this day, ever more subtly now with the aid of sophisticated digital means on display in contemporary advertising. One only needs to look at, for example, the Victoria Secret lingerie spreads in fashion magazines to realize that something is going on underneath the lacy bras. In some of the shots the models have had their voluptuous breasts smoothed over to hide their nipples in an impossible balancing act between "flaunting it" and controlled exposure.

Self-portraiture and the interplay between the veiling and unveiling of the female body are recurrent themes in the installation. Take for example the two large-format photographs that hang over the wallpaper. A gauzy white sheet fills the entire frame and covers the body of the artist who lies underneath re-staging iconic poses of the Hollywood bombshell Marilyn Monroe and the porn star Linda Lovelace. By replacing the in-your-face sexuality with the intimate sensuality of the body hidden in what could be an unmade bed, Bermudez shifts the focus from objectification to subjectivity and offers the beholder a more generous rhetoric of desire.

The cinematic and popular-culture references are echoed in a video, which is also part of the installation. Here a tight frame shows the cropped face of the artist, who is masquerading as a movie starlet. She is shown heavily made-up but not quite ready for her close-up. While her face glitters with Las Vegas fabulousness, her eyelids close intermittently in what appears to be a half-dreaming state. The image is both alluring and disconcerting. What is she dreaming of? She seems to be inviting us into the interstices of her self while simultaneously fending off our voyeuristic impulses. Shielded by artifice ultimately she refuses to be arrested by our gaze.

nella foto:

Anticipated 1, C-Print, 30" x 40". Euridice Arratia
New York, 2002

opening reception
thursday january 16, 2003
6:00-8:00 p.m.

project room: Elia Alba

Generous Miracles Gallery
529 west 20th sreet. 8th floor
New York, ny 10011

stampa

permanent link