Healthway National Graduate Show
Scrutiny of body weight and food, dismemberment and dissection were twists on narratives of the body which were in evidence in several works in the Hatched: Healthway National Graduate Show for 1998. Hatched was a survey of almost fifty artists who graduated from tertiary art schools throughout Australia in 1997. Each was represented by one work and the show offered an excellent opportunity to view a distillation of the range of current emergent practices-including installations, new media arts, sculpture, video, painting, printmaking and photography.
The large-scale billboard by Nat Paton (Queensland College of Art), Untitled from the "Hot Stuff Series" was a photographic image of an Elvis-lookalike (actually Paten herself), in the infamous white spangled costume, holding a set of bathroom scales which were imprinted with an image of the American flag. This dramatic and humorous work confronted issues pertaining to the western cultural fear of fat. Amanda Paige Alderson (The Western Australian School of Art, Design and Media) also engaged the theme of body weight. Her installation, Fitting the Mould, In the Pursuit of Beauty, Perfection and the Happily Ever After included parodies of covers of women's magazines, for instance an issue of Dolly with the cover story headline "Have you got the legs for THE MINI? Follow our measurements". These were exhibited alongside clothing racks of assorted very small female garments, some of the sex-shop variety, together with two 'change rooms', one of which had a perspex door and a set of scales inside it. With so many elements crammed together Alderson 's message was diminished by the physical confusion of the installation. Angela Rowson (Sydney College of the Arts), in her witty still