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| Jacinta
Schreuder Make it hot |
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 Jacinta Schreuder, Make it Hot, 1996
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This is a candy-land; candy coloured
shelves with candy coloured window awnings and candy
coloured girls. It is a land devoid of any depth,
darkness or shadow, constituted instead by strips of
thin wood which flourish and revel in their distance
from anything resembling 'reality'. Presenting a
smooth and impenetrable surface they are content to
skirt and skim the surface, satisfied to be a vision
of such sterile and flat brilliance that they exude
an aura of decay and a sense of suffocation, caught
up in a terminal and fatal silence. Four objects: propped up against the wall stands a huge swap-card (one), a memento from the 1970s it is something to be bought, sold, bargained and bartered for. Frozen forever in her original stasis the girl offers herself as an image of blinding saturation and repulsion. Her Hair as an organic abstraction, perfect in every grasping tendril is echoed in the helmet of short, pink, girl-hair in the smaller room (two). Lime green shelves (three) are positioned at a child's height along the wall, strangely absent of any toys they hint at collections of objects and the spaces used to house them, collections normally stored in a child's musty bedroom (and children are always the best collectors). Pink and white blinds (four) fit neatly over the windows, shades designed to keep the harsh Australian sun out of suburban homes, but here positioned on the 'wrong' side of the window plane, protruding into the room instead of sliding off the to the outside. We have been given and imaginary dream landscape where the inconsistent references to location, size and space creates a sense of distance and of inversion. We are pulled in many different directions: up, down, inside, outside, bigger, smaller, adult, child. Outside when we look at the house front blinds; inside when we look at the empty shelves. Small standing beside the massive swap-card; large next to the shelves hung low on the wall. In our normal perception of the world there is a determinable sense or direction, but in this world we are moved in all directions simultaneously. Spatial relations have been displaced to create a sense of fragmentation and abstraction, distance and proximity, and the obscure selectiveness in presenting these particular elements supports an other-worldliness. Unknowingly embodying all these sense and elements is the orange girl smiling coyly at us. Being too large and too small, standing in an indeterminable space of inside and outside, past and present, she is caught between two worlds: the over-grown girl and the dwarfed adult. Alice . . . perhaps. . . ? Andrea Tu © The artist,
writer and |
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 Jacinta Schreuder, Make it Hot, 1996 |
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