Bianca Barling, Jane Burton, Monica Tichacek, Mimi Kelly and Pat Brassington
A perfect pop song moves boundlessly with the constrictions of its form, distilling potency from its brief time and space: PJ Harvey’s Dress is a perfect 3.18 minute movement from desire to disorder and abject horror, all embodied in the dress; ‘starting off red, clean and sparkling’ to ‘filthy tight, the dress is filthy, I’m falling flat, and my arms are empty’. As Harvey’s song describes a seamlessly tragic arc ending in dissolution, the artists of ‘Dark Dreams + Fluorescent Flesh’ move in clean darkened rooms offering siren songs of never ending desire.
At the heart of the Gothic disorder that moves through the works seen in ‘Dark Dreams + Fluorescent Flesh’ is female desire. Chaos as the product of women’s loosened desire is the unspeakable secret at Gothic’s core, a force so dangerous that it must be displaced onto things: dresses, fabrics, spaces. And it is the conflict between the attractions of desire and the horror of bodily dissolution that underlies its irreconcilable tension between freedom and constriction. These tensions and attractions appear in the displacements of dressing up and acting out, the hair, the patterning and textures of clothes and textiles, the rooms, bodies, organs, ambiguities and diversions, all the saturated desire and slippery imaginings of ‘Dark Dreams + Fluorescent Flesh’.
The conflict between desire and dissolution is played out in the tension between interior and exterior and in intense interiority and claustrophobia in these works, from Monica Tichacek’s satin padded cell and Pat Brassington’s Cambridge Road (2007) series, that resembles 1930’s crime scene images, to the tinkling pornographic doll house of Bianca Barling’s Gammelfleisch (2009), that forces the viewer to peek in like a gigantic Alice