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Stills Gallery offers a quiet space to actually spend some time with unfashionably regular, small-scaled photographs. In this case, it provided Marion Marrison an intimate venue for meditating on debased feminine stereotypes—without the work simply recalling 1980s-style feminist job-lots. You may remember the genre. If you don't, picture a series of hard-won theoretical moves on visual pleasure and female desire, lavish photo-media projects and dramatic reversals in reputation for neo-conceptual artists like Sarah Charlesworth, Sylvia Kolbowski and Barbara Kruger—here for one year's Biennale, gone in the next.
I must admit, however, that when I walked in the door and looked around, I felt a perverse nostalgia for those serious visual encounters of a conceptual and political kind. These cibachromes looked level-headed, but not as hermetic as the New York-London haut feminist photomedia work of ten years ago. Moreover Marrison's tableaux lacked that glamour element that I for one associate with feminist photo-media. Her plastic fetishes, masks and dollies have the look of suburban sex-shop stocktake sales—a far cry from the up-market world of London-based Lacanian discussion groups. Instead, these meticulously photographed petit objets, framed with schoolgirl neatness, look depressingly local, as a friend later put it—stuff that wouldn't even rate a mention at a cultural studies conference.
Perhaps Marrison was simply playing tricks with feminist memory, I thought. Yet as I looked, the work's suburban surreality prompted memories of an earlier time, another place. Marrison grew up in Hobart. Her irreducibly daggy icons of feminine investment have a pathos that many provincial girls would immediately recognise. Forget international feminist theory; these cibachromes work better as a visual accompaniment to Bob Hudson's old Newcastle song, 'girls in our town'