Simone Slee, Amanda Ahmed
and Megan Marshall

1st Floor Gallery
Melbourne
2nd Aug to 13 Aug, 1995

  Having completed their art courses and exhibited in Melbourne the work of Amanda Ahmed, Simone Slee and Megan Marshall at 1st Floor Gallery takes the form of a conversation. A clue to the artists' respective works is to be found in the collaborative piece Tainted Love in which tissue was sculptured into flowers and stuck on the wall progressively throughout the course of the exhibition. As a work in flux Tainted Love captures the collective concern with its idea of process and physicality. Rather than being disguised, process became eliminatory.

Simone Slee
Simone Slee

Whilst the works negate strict definition, room is made for a theoretical and an art historical reading. The three artists in this show offer ways out of thinking the sexualised binaries of visual culture.

According to Psychoanalysis, subjectivity is articulated in terms of spaces and physical boundaries - of a fixing of limits of corporeality. Likewise, art has traditionally been defined in terms of contained from and experience. In each of these artists' work, notions of subjective and aesthetic closure are challenged by sculptural objects whose overt pleasure in productive processes testifies to the fluidity and pliability of specifically female corporeality.

Megan Marshall
Megan Marshall

 

Amanda Ahmed
Amanda Ahmed

Telling absent in the exhibition are any figurative representations of, or literal allusions to the traditional modes of representing the female body. Instead, Ahmed's abstract scourers, Marshall's plastic sacks and Slee's tissue sculpture stand-in as ciphers of female embodiment. As phantom bodies whose visual power exists as much in the materials and processes used by each artist, the works refuse any understanding of female corporeality as inert, fixed, passive and biologically determined. Pattern procedure and metaphor take the place of objective form and subjective stasis.

As theory verifies, the political and historical questioning of meaning, subjectivity and power, is also a problem for aesthetics. The work of Ahmed plays with the notion of the gallery wall and its desire to limit and frame. Her scourers provide a rough edge to the clinically neutral white-zone of the gallery and its attendant masculine discourses, while Marshall's transparent plastic sacks make it errantly bulge. The lightweight formlessness evident Slee's sculpture (a reference to Eva Hesse's work remade in jeweller's tissue and cotton thread) works the traditions of renegade modernist like Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.

Patriarchy's understanding of the female body as Other, as the object, the solid and definite thus returns in this exhibition as indefinite, unstable, fluid and blurry. The emphasis on process and materials attests to the artists' desire to reconfigure knowledges and technologies and to produce ambiguous spaces full of erotic absurdity and discomfort.

Lucy Elliott
1996