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Glare is the camera's flash turning reality into stone. Glare sparkles with the bright lights of deliverance. Glare is garish. Glare is to glower. Glare is the ricochet of harsh tropical sun. Glare is not looking, the inability to look. Glare bums our eyes, imprinting on our sight a shadowy overlay.
'Glare' was the title of Jay Younger's survey exhibition mounted by the Queensland University Art Museum.1 As a title it was apt. For Younger's work has never been straightforward in its task, never sought to substantiate reality. Instead, it has beckoned with magic and dreams and sparkle, leaving an aftertaste that signals a world less perfect.
'Glare' provided the opportunity to pin down that aftertaste: an opportunity not only to reassess Younger's earlier photographic works and to sample, albeit in a partial way, her ephemeral practice, but also to showcase her photographic series of 2002, 'Ulterior' . 'Glare' underscored the fact that, throughout Younger's work, the sparkle and allure of temptation is ever roped in by core structures.
Girls just want to have fun was almost a political anthem for women in the 1980s, as if putting a finger up to the no-bras, no-lipstick, ·no-stiletto feminists of the previous generation. Younger has never been constrained by decorum. When she does politics it is accompanied by loud music and a mirror ball. It does her an injustice to play her politics straight. 'Ulterior', after all, does revolve around the Fitzgerald Enquiry, but it is the disco version. More particularly, Younger's return in 2002 to the Fitzgerald Enquiry brings her back to the late 1980s when the earliest works in 'Glare' were made. It is as if her practice in Queensland... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline